Review Much Ado About Nothing (Preview)

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Once Upon A Time In Mexico
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It's Mucho Ado About Nothing with sombreros, ponchos and cigarillos at Shakespeare's Globe set in the midst of the Mexican Revolution in the early years of the 20th century.

The steam clears revealing wooden slatted railway wagons spanning the stage, a  means of moving people and supplies from and to the home encampment.  

The grubby rebels, the leader Don Pedro (Steve John Shepherd),  lanky, moustachioed Benedick (Matthew Needham) and young puppy rebel Claudio (Marcello Cruz) arrive on horses, cleverly evoked by riders on stilts and wire horses' heads.

Here the women stride around with rifles and belts of bullets criss crossing their female apparel. 

In the chauvinist rebel camp environment, there is also Don Pedro's sister, the saturnine Juana (Jo Dockery). It's a gender swap from the original Shakespeare text and the male machismo surrounding her gives some motivation for her bitterness and jealousy.

Directed by Matthew Dunster, it all works surprisingly well. Don Pedro is a slightly insecure Pancho Villa figure at a time when several factions were fighting for dominance in Mexico. The tough Leonato (Martin Marquez in a fine performance), complete with  black eye patch, is still slightly vulnerable when it comes to family honour.

Beatrice (Beatriz Romilly) is his slightly older niece, a slightly more careworn woman than her hardy but still more than slightly fragile cousin Hero (Anya Chalotra).

The music from composer James Maloney and the three-strong band led by Zands Duggan with Matt Bacon on guitar and Miguel Gorodi on trumpet, conjures up a hot, dusty and vibrant Mexico. But it also works dramatically, signalling the mood of the oncoming action and enabling fluid, clear scene changes for the audience.

Anna Fleischle's design keeps it simple: The train wagons from the National Railways of Mexico  provide the backdrop. On one side stands a blue and white tiled pillar with an altar and a Madonna shrine. On the other side, a pillar has a wooden bench curving round as a seat and a perch for the beer bottles.

Away from the main stage is another island platform in the midde of the groundlings, serving as a second stage. 

The tricks played on Beatrice and Benedict make sense in the boredom of the anti-climactic periods between fighting.  The easily-swayed males and their vulnerability, alongside machismo, makes sense of the savage rejection of Hero, not only by Claudio but also Don Pedro and her own father Leonato. 

The place names are changed to suit Mexico. The currency of course is the peso and the masked ball with Fleischle's flamboyant brightly colouried Mexican costumes  becomes a lusty but formalised celebration of the bull and virility. 

In this version, Dogberry becomes Dog Berry (Ewan Wardrop), an American movie director who mangles words in translation. 

His box camera footage helps uncover the villain of the piece and if the storyline feels a little strained, that's more the nature of Shakespearean comedy than this production. 

For a Hollywood newsreel and movie director really did accompany Sancho Panza in real life and there was even a contract, if a little less spectacular and prescriptive than some implied.

It's an earthy, bright and gaudy Much Ado with the music effortlessly flagging up the comic and serious moments.  

Very much an ensemble piece from Beatrice and Benedick, through Don Pedro, Juana, Hero, Claudio and Hero, to the sweetly-singing child soldier (Lucy Brandon), it's a green light for a mucho enjoyable Much Ado About Nothing.  

Review After Independence

After Independence

by May (Mwewe) Sumbwanyambe

The Lie Of The Land

http://www.arcolatheatre.com

The country, a former colony, at first is unnamed. A farmer's family, husband Guy (Peter Guinness), wife Kathleen (Sandra Duncan) and daughter Chipo  (Beatriz Romilly)  all born in Africa, alone on their farm in the bush. 

Any night time rustle may signal imminent danger, not from nature but from maurauding gangs of former soldiers. And the name of the farm? Independence.

Part family saga, part fable, we learn eventually this is modern Zimbabwe with a civil servant (Stefan Adegbole)  making the trek to the farm with an offer to buy. An offer, so far, refused.

We never learn the ins and outs of funding and earning from the farm in a post colonial state. But this gives the play an archetypal feel and greater reach, stretching beyond Zimbabwe with implications of post colonialism for economies, property and families further afield..

This is the debut produced full-length play from May Sumbwanyambe. It sometimes feels  like an apprentice work, as put together as a film script rather than theatre. but it has a pleasing clarity and intellectual rigor which keeps the attention.

At the same time, there is a tendency to over-explain and some clunky symbolism loaded mostly upon the mother Kathleen.

Yet focussing as much on young Africans, black and white, as the legacy left by older generations, it is directed with clever stylistic precision by George Turvey. 

The lingering poses of the actors  convey the vast vistas,  entrenched self-dramatizing positions, alongside centuries of resentments . The enclosed wooden crate design by Max Dorey lit by Christopher Nairne also allows a feel of the ample raw resources, punishing labour and the open spaces beyond the wooden slats.

So it's a curious mixture of the over emphatic and the skilfully placed justaposition. The struggle for rights may be, as forcefully put, about the struggle for land. 

But there is also a recognition there are some legacies of colonialism that are not just a matter of simple ownership reversal. A hint of the new tribe, having emerged  from  European exploitation,   in the  double edged comment of the daughter Chipo to bureacrat Charles:

"My family line may not go back in this country as far as yours, but we are all seedlings from the same tree, Charles. Only some are dark and some are light."

The myths of two separate peoples, in reality yoked together, clash in this intriguing if flawed work. Meanwhile the current predatory global  search for property, whether for individual or collective enrichment, make the disquiet over  government, employment, business, contracts and disenfranchisement hit close to home. An amber/green light.