Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s “problem plays”. It straddles genre boundaries, enigmatic & challenging, darkly funny. Yes it’s still considered a comedy even though we hear a lot about executions & life in prison, offering glimpses of a nasty world that’s scary, unfair, dangerous.

Christopher Manousos’ brilliant adaptation of M4M (as it’s often abbreviated) captures all those contradictions. The revival opened Saturday at Crow’s Theatre.

I watched five people making a live radio play. In radio you don’t see the actors, you hear them. But we got to se them: making sound effects, reading lines, interacting, using microphones. In the intimate space of Crow’s Studio Theatre that means we get to have it both ways.

The set puts us into a studio: which for the purposes of the play means we could be anywhere. It’s a virtual world where the imagination is free to see whatever it wants. Our director and adaptor Christopher Manousos explained his thinking:
“The inspiration to set the play within a play inside a contemporary sound studio seemed to offer endless creative opportunities. To explore the tension between what is seen and what is heard, and to give the audience a contemporary point of entry into the play, where they get to watch one story while hearing another. It’s an opportunity to stretch their senses while leaning into the complexity of the original play.”

It feels very authentic in the way the usual balance shifts. In the Studio Theatre it’s as if we were groundlings in 1603, because we’re so intimately close, listening. And because of this adaptation, putting our radio players in modern attire, it disrupts our usual modern cinematic visual fetish, enticing us to listen, seeing the story through our minds’ eyes.

We enter the world of the story through our ears rather than our eyes.

We go back to the past riding Shakespeare’s language even as we see modern actors playing the parts.

Five actors –James Cavanagh, Katherine Gauthier, Beck Lloyd, Danté Prince and Sébastien Heins– portray the over twenty personages of the original. That’s a recipe for something wildly theatrical, engaging our imaginations. We see the sound effects employed and created onstage. We even get to see Danté go back and forth between two different portrayals, altering the voice while signalling to us with a visual cue like sunglasses on or off that they’re alternating between one personage and another.

I noticed too another way in which we get to have it both ways. If this were just a radio play, the physical appearance of the players wouldn’t matter. Young or old, tall or short, fit or chubby, so long as the voice is the right sound, domineering or submissive, spiritual, seductive, silly or strong they can look like any shape under the sun. But this is actually quite an attractive group of voice actors, their interactions irresistible to watch.

Of all Shakespeare’s comedies this one is especially apt for this sort of adaptation, a story involving questions of identity and authority, laws that are enforced differently depending on who you are. It’s handy that in a story concerned with the person under the clothes, that it’s so easy to do disguises and assumed identities in a radio play. I’ve always found the denouement of this comedy a bit troubling, the arbitrariness of the happy ending suggesting to me that we are only as safe as the whims of the tyrant in charge. And yes it’s never been more timely.

I enjoyed looking across the narrow playing space at the other half of the audience, watching the reactions & responses of fellow audience members, often laughing riotously, always engrossed and sometimes with mouths open in awe.

Manousos’s magnificent Measure for Measure must not be missed, at Crow’s Studio Theatre until October 11th (tickets & information).