It is the Globe's misfortune that this rarely performed play opens just a month after Simon McBurney's production made such a stir at the National. It is the Globe's mistake that director John Dove treats the play as if it is some sort of light-hearted comic romp.
We get betweenact jigs instead of darkness and shadows; jolly japes and jokes instead of moral complexities. The result is an Isabella (Sophie Thompson) who makes Mary Poppins look complicated and a Duke (Mark Rylance) who is little more than a limping, stuttering, bungling buffoon who almost faints at the sight of blood.
Both Thompson and Rylance fare reasonably well and demonstrate why they are a cut above the rest of an otherwise undistinguished cast. Dove's production also has the merit of suggesting that both Isabella and the Duke are innocents abroad, who, just as Angelo is surprised by the "sharp appetite" of lust, are astonished to discover that the world outside their cloistered existence is a nasty, merciless place.
The point might have been better made if this Elizabethan underworld wasn't depicted in a way that makes the average children's nursery look like a den of iniquity. Low life seems something of the high life here. The whole production feels like some kind of sop to the audience, as if those involved feel we are not grown-up enough to withstand the play's unpleasantness.
I left the theatre with the feeling that I had been patronised for three full hours.
· Until September 24. Box office: 020-7401 9919.
