Rehearsal pictures for Measure for Measure starring Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden have been released.

Measure for Measure opens at the Donmar Warehouse on October 11, where Atwell and Lowden will be rotating the roles of the powerful Deputy and powerless Novice within each performance of the play.

Artistic director Josie Rourke directs Shakespeare’s play, which is imagined both in the year it was written and in 2018.

Set in a corrupt Vienna, the Duke hands control to his Deputy, an orthodox puritan reformer, who uses an ancient law to try citizens for sexual misconduct and enact the death sentence. When a religious Novice pleads for mercy, the Deputy falls guilty of the very crime condemned by the law.

“They will alternate roles on the same night,” Rourke told the Standard. “What the audience will see is scenes replayed with the gender shifted and therefore the power dynamic shifted.

“One of the ideas behind the production Is measuring our own standards against what happens when a man says something to when a woman says the same thing.”

Ben Allen, Rachel Denning, Jackie Clune, Molly Harris, Raar Rawi, Helena Wilson, Adam McNamara, Nicholas Burns, Sule Rimi, Matt Bardock and Anwar Russell complete the cast.

Measure for Measure runs at the Donmar Warehouse from October 11-November 24, donmarwarehouse.com [Source]