Le risque du vedettariat Des costumes composites Deux toiles « expressionnistes » et un mur délabré Une profusion d’objets scéniques La pissotière et le sanctuaire Escalus : un juge équitable terni par Zadek Une mise en scène « à l’allemande » ?
Having staged Measure for Measure twice in Germany before (Ulm 1960, Bremen 1967), Peter Zadek returned to his “fetish” play in 1991 at the Odéon-Théâtre de l’Europe in Paris then touring France and Switzerland. Following closely Jean-Michel Déprats’s translation, he grouped famous actors (Isabelle Huppert, François Marthouret, Philippe Clevenot, André Marcon), the impression of ensemble being superseded by their individual fame in previous roles. They delivered their lines with a flat intonation ; a further distancing principle was André Diot’s full lighting in the auditorium. The painter Johannes Grützke designed costumes reminiscent of the Renaissance for the Aristocracy (full black or red velvet), composite for the others, but revealing their functions (handcuffs for the policeman). Grützke produced two expressionistic backcloths a “winter” mountain landscape, a “summer” view with four silhouettes, a mobile brick wall (hardly stopping the infiltration of dubious characters on stage : a skeleton, the pimp, some prostitutes), and a grey cloth screening the stage thus focussing on the bare front stage (Angelo’s austere study, the oratory to Mary). The stage proper was littered with a heteroclite profusion of props (grossly painted ply-wood prostitutes in the streets, mangled limbs of women and a bloody head in a bucket of water in the prison). Subversive stage businesses, tinged with provocative or blasphemous undertones, impressed the spectators : the executioner sawing the leg of a prostitute who, turning out to be a real actress, screamed, vomited, and ran offstage ; the urinal next to the oratory (where the Duke in disguise shared bread and champagne with Isabella as they schemed the “bed-trick” – sending Angelo’s former fiancée to Angelo instead of her). A further degradation of values was the rendering of Escalus, the impartial judge who can show leniency, as the actor took off his white wig with a laugh and smoked a cigar with Angelo. By the same token Isabella accepted the Duke’s marriage proposal but with a grin that proved her superficiality. Zadek aimed at unmasking the hypocrisy of Western morality with shocking, unsettling images which were far more commented upon than the themes of the play. It seems that French critics were not prepared to accept a staging that they qualified as a German, expressionistic provocation.
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