You enter the room expecting to watch the making of a simple radio play. There are five microphones on two conjoined tables, with cords snaking to the ceiling. Foley equipment like chains and keys and boots is arrayed on the tabletops.
You settle in, assuming that required proximity to the mics will keep the cast close and the production static.
You couldn’t be more wrong.
Christopher Manousos’s adaptation of Measure for Measure—which he also directs, returning with the original House + Body cast after a buzzworthy 2025 run—drops you through an invisible trapdoor. One moment, you’re watching five voice actors prepare to record a radio dramatization of Shakespeare’s play. They are The Director (Sébastien Heins), The Film Star (Katherine Gauthier), The Best Friend (Jamie Cavanagh), The Sound Guy (Danté Prince), and a late, fill-in addition: The Actor Playing Isabella (Beck Lloyd). The next, you’re inside Shakespeare’s corrupt Vienna, as seen through the filter of these characters’ contemporary power and gender dynamics. In this disorienting hall of mirrors, the play’s central questions of justice, mercy, lust and loyalty refract in every direction.
Measure for Measure is already one of Shakespeare’s thorniest plays: simply put, it’s a “problem comedy” whose problems never resolve. In it, the Duke of Vienna, absent ruler of a morally decaying city, deputizes the puritanical Angelo to restore order, then disguises himself as a friar to watch the results. Angelo proves an immediate hypocrite: he’ll spare the condemned Claudio only if Claudio’s sister Isabella, a novice nun, surrenders her virginity to him. Isabella is the play’s most impressive figure: intelligent, fierce, and principled. Yet she is more acted upon than acting: hectored not just by the lustful Angelo, but by her brother and the Duke himself. The play’s neat resolution turns on a clever “bed trick” and “head trick,” whose assumptions about human commoditization and interchangeability feel decidedly ugly. And the ending — the Duke’s unanswered proposal to Isabella (who, remember, was headed for the nunnery at the start of the play) — is famous for its ambiguity.
Manousos’ genius is to nest these problems within the frame characters’ dynamics: the fraught relationship between the coolly in-charge Director and his poised, ever-watchful Film Star spouse; the papering over of tensions by the Best Friend’s bro-ish camaraderie and the Sound Guy’s efficient professionalism — and the Actor Playing Isabella’s dawning awareness that she’s walked into something more complicated than a neutral recording session. We live all of it through the glances, gestures and collegial and corporate banter laid atop the play. Of course, questions of power in 2026 are considerably more nuanced than Angelo’s lustful predation and the Duke’s self-serving manipulation. Parsing the studio dynamics — both before and after the tables split apart, the recording starts, and the cast members begin prowling the studio in a fluid dance of art and actuality — is delicious detective work that rewards close attention.
You can’t help but pay that attention because the acting performances are layered and, frankly, extraordinary. Lloyd’s Isabella is an absolute powerhouse: she wields Shakespeare’s knotty language with fluency and flash, summoning the emotional energy to spar with Angelo, berate her brother, and navigate the Duke’s machinations. At the exact same moment, as the Actor, her eyes and movements express worlds: she peers at faces intently, a smile or frown forming at the corners of her mouth as she reads the room. Expected suddenly to double as the dim-witted Constable Elbow (clearly, this was never discussed), she flounders, then clutching a thrown script, strongarms Prince’s Pompey the bawd with comic, “on book” panache.
Gauthier’s Film Star, also ever-watchful, is catlike, sliding into a dizzying array of roles: merciful as Escalus, and chastened as the jilted Mariana. Prince’s Sound Guy is smooth and fantastically natural. His radio voice announcements of each act and recap of Part 1 make the chaos orderly for us, and his utility roles—among others, as the threatened Claudio and his flamboyant, blowhard friend Lucio (yes, he must share scenes with himself)—demand virtuosic comic timing. And Heins’s Director is cool, calculating and professional. In the frame, he snaps coolly into and out of his roles as Director and actor; and in the play, his Angelo is just as nimble in navigating the switch between ostensibly just leader and lustful hypocrite. Finally, Cavanagh uses his vast, improvisation-honed acting skills to bend his face, body and voice in differentiating the deceptive Duke from his disguise as Father Lodowick … plus sundry other roles.
Chris Malkowski’s lighting shifts colour from scene to scene — green, then pink, then grey — and spotlights certain actors as a clever patina of fog allows others to melt into the corners of the room. Riel Reddick-Stevens’s sound design cocoons us inside the studio setting, with a heartbeat that pulses beneath the action and unifies the disparate levels of this experience. It’s wonderfully intense because all at once, we are processing Shakespeare’s base play, with its rich complication and discomfort; and the radio play, whose sonic smoothness belies its chaotic and kinetic reality; and beneath both, the ‘real-world’ drama of these five actors and their interpersonal and industry power dynamics.
The production ends as Shakespeare’s does: ambiguously. The Duke’s proposal hangs. The radio play ends. An indecent (?) proposal in the frame fades to black, unresolved.
You fell through the trapdoor. If you’re like me, you’re still marvelling — and still falling — days later.
Measure for Measure plays at Crow’s Theatre (345 Carlaw Avenue) through October 11. Tickets and information at crowstheatre.com.
© Scott Sneddon, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
