As the title clearly implies, Phil Wilmott has shifted the action of Shakespeare's great fable about justice and mercy from Vienna to 1930s Malaya. This is a world of colonial lust, fierce rainstorms and chirping cicadas. But far from offering fresh perspectives, the relocation of the text reduces the play to the level of an overheated Somerset Maugham melodrama.
Wilmott's purpose is presumably to point up the sexual hypocrisy that accompanied the British colonial mandate. Angelo thus becomes a white-suited district officer who condemns the Eurasian Claudio for fornication while lusting after his novitiate sister, Isabella. The idea that political and sexual imperialism go hand in hand is underlined by the fact that Angelo's rejected mistress, Mariana, is herself Eurasian. And to cap it all Shakespeare's Duke, here translated into the Malayan High Commissioner, concocts the whole elaborate plot to save Claudio and expose Angelo in order to get his paws on Isabella.
There is only one insuperable problem with all this: Shakespeare's play has nothing whatsoever do with the idea of colonialism as a sexual metaphor. If that was Wilmott's prime interest, why on earth didn't he revive Caryl Churchill's Cloud Nine? By using Shakespeare as his scenario-writer, all he does is mangle and distort a great play.
Telescoping the text frantically, he omits most of the low-life scenes, which show how sexual licence slides into moral anarchy. Even the storytelling is bungled, so that in the final act, Lucio's realisation that the absent Duke has been operating in the guise of a meddling padre is signalled right from the start.
One performance stands out in this witless farrago. Richard Dillane, with his brutal Orwellian haircut and sweating palms, intelligently suggests that Angelo is an uprooted public-school product whose isolation feeds his feverish sexual fantasies. Andy de la Tour does all he can to convey the Duke's duplicity and Lourdes Faberes catches something of Isabella's impassioned innocence.
But Shakespeare's mind-stretching moral ambiguity is reduced to a blindingly obvious attack on the double-standards of British colonial rule. Given his fascination with tropical rainstorms and avian sound-effects, Wilmott seems more interested in atmosphere than ideas and leaves me wondering, along with incoming National Theatre director Nick Hytner, whether our theatre's classical tradition is in serious decline.
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