SOURCE: Billington, Michael. Review of Measure for Measure. Guardian (5 May 2003): 18.

In the following review, Billington critiques Sean Holmes's 2003 Royal Shakespeare Company staging of Measure for Measure and finds fault with its overemphasis on the corruption of modern society.

After its airborne Taming of the Shrew, the Royal Shakespeare Company comes back to earth with this problematic comedy. Sean Holmes's production has pace, energy and a fine Isabella in Emma Fielding; but its moral negativism seems a hangover from the director's recent work on The Roman Actor.

Holmes's boldest stroke is to set the action in 1940s Vienna: a hedonistic, war-battered world in which whores and black-marketeers haunt the streets and where you half expect to see Harry Lime scuttling into the sewers. But, although this gives the action a social context, it does little to illuminate the central debate between justice and mercy. Even though there are hints...