**2. Triadic Viewing**

In watching the production, I was struck by how often the visual images land on three distinct characters or dimensions of the stage. Using the three red boxes to indicate three different kinds of "cells" the prison, the cloister and the brothel, Nick Ormerod visually supplies the triad that underlies the play. In this first image, the audience can distinctly see the three red boxes that dominate the stage. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-24.

This second image depicts the three boxes in a more obvious allusion to what they are. Claudio sits in an electric chair, awaiting execution on the left; Isabella stands transfixed in a kind of cloister; and Pompey shags a prostitute in the brothel. That the brothel and the prison bookend the cloister is a powerful commentary on the institutionalized way culture polices and encounters sexuality: https: //www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-25. The production radiates energy and movement. It begins with the ensemble standing between two of the boxes, a tight group. They all look out at the audience with trained intensity, looking to catch the audience's eye. Their gaze stays trained on the audience for an uncomfortable amount of time. Their facial expressions were unwavering, defiant. By training their gaze on the audience, and using partial house lights on the audience, the actors seem to implicate or invite the audience in whatever journey they are taking. These are not historical bodies, representing a past or some kind of literary tradition; they are in the moment of a lived experience that seems to be happening at that particular moment. As a group, the actors quickly walk around the stage, encircling the boxes; gradually one breaks off, stands too long looking up at a light into the wings of the theater as if staring at the sun, and the others leave him. This is the Duke, not a confident, control-freak, but an introverted, confused man. When we meet Claudio, he is framed by three officers and three boxes loom behind him. The title "Fornicator" hangs on a placard around his neck. https://www.cheekbyjowl.com/productions/measure-for-measure/#imageGallery-216-3 As the brothel and the prison frame the ends of the stage, we realize that Claudio's crime of sleeping with his fiancée will cost him his life.

In addition to the looming red boxes, both transparent and opaque, Donnellan and Ormerod deploy the actors to create the setting of the performance. In his book-length study of Cheek by Jowl's productions, Peter Kirwan uses this production of *Measure for Measure* as his final example because it exemplifies Donnellan's philosophy that "everyone is human, and that change—and theatre—come from the understanding that other people are different to me . . . .Cheek by Jowl's concept... is to treat characters as humans with stakes, and thus to allow something 'alive' to emerge" (Kirwan 2020, p. 156). Not only does this production attend to the moral and emotional life of the characters, but all of the actors also function as a mob, a crowd, the walls of a prison, etc. As Noah Birksted-Breen observes, "At the centre of this production was the human body as an element of stage design" (Birksted-Breen 2016, p. 88). The actors are onstage almost throughout the entire production, witnessing and judging the actions of the other players. The audience is also implicated in the production, as the characters often gesture to the audience as if it were "the people." The transformability of the actor's body is emphasized in a way that resonates with de Toro's explanation of the theatre sign (which rests on Peirce's triadic logic): "The transformability of the theatre sign is at the very essence of theatricality: in theatre, any sign has the potential of losing its own substance and acquiring another without losing its effectiveness in the process" (p. 71). The very nature of this transformability is at the heart of Peirce's triadic logic. As Umberto Eco and Ann Berthoff both point to in Peirce's work, it is the idea of transmission, process and interpretation that is not static, but evolving that corresponds so well to thinking about the theatrical sign.
