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In Measure For Measure, William Shakespeare wrote, accidentally or by design, the trickiest sort of a play - a comedy with tragic relief. The work gets an alternatively sombre, sardonic and, in the last act, rousing exuberant treatment tonight as the fifth of The Shakespeare Plays to be aired by PBS this season. Measure For Measure at 8 o'clock on Channel 26 benefits immeasurably from the key performances of two women. Kate Nelligan is the image of idealised faultlessness as Isabella, interrupted in the pursuit of her religious vows at a convent by the nasty news that her brother Claudio is to be executed for the crime - or the sin or whatever - of fornication with a woman to whom he was not married. For this he is paraded through the streets and then chucked into a grimy cell at ye local Jaile. Jacqueline Pearce, meanwhile, voluptuously and charismatically represents another aspect of womanhood; as the once wronged Mariana, she substitutes herself for Isabella one naughty night when an unscrupulous nobleman demands Isabella's virginity for himself as payment for her brother's release. Many of the male roles are tossed off handily as well - Tim Piggott-Smith as the cad Angelo, John McEnery as the insufferably foppish Lucio and Kenneth Colley as Duke Vincentio, who spends much of the play disguised "a very saucy friar" in order to ascertain the pervasiveness of corruption in old Vienna. "Quite athwart goes all decorum" is the duke's little weather report on the city's moral condition. Whether Shakespeare embarked upon a diatribe and changed his mind mid-play, or whether he intended to lead his audience into what appears a moral fable about hypocrisy and injustice and then surprise them with a treat of a farce, we do not know. But mysteriously and for reasons probably built in by that old crowd pleaser of Avon, Measure For Measure works splendidly and gladdening, and the fluid touch of director Desmond Davis serves it well. Tom Shales Wednesday 11th April 1979
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