Review Much Ado About Nothing

Francis Beckett admires a beguiling Benedick and distinctive Don John in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing but finds the 1918 setting unconvincing

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Making A Home Fit For A Hero 
https://www.rsc.org.uk/haymarket

The decision to set Much Ado About Nothing at the end of the First World War sounds like a good idea, since the play starts with the men returning from war.

But, like a lot of good ideas for making Shakespeare work better for audiences nowadays, it struggles to survive its confrontation with parts of the text. 

There are some splendid things in it, the best of which is Edward Bennett's witty, sardonic Benedick with a touch of self-mockery and impeccable comic timing.

The first scene of raillery between Benedick and Beatrice is very well done, with every ounce of humour extracted from Shakespeare's very clever dialogue.

When hidden Benedick is gulled into believing Beatrice has declared her love for him, it is laugh-out-loud funny. This is achieved by making the best use of Shakespeare's own funny dialogue and building the business round it.

But it's followed by a dreadfully unfunny scene where the comic possibilities are overlooked in which the same happens to Beatrice. And the relaxed, urbane Benedick contrasts strangely with Lisa Dillon's stressed and ambivalent Beatrice.

The clowns don't work at all. Director Christopher Luscombe seems to have taken the view that the words are not especially funny and he needs to extract his laughs by means of rather too forced and over-the-top slapstick. 

Nick Haverson's Dogberry roars out his lines, and does his best to make us laugh by imitating disabilities which are not at all funny. At one point I was left with the impression he was pretending to have Parkinson's Disease.

Any version of Much Ado About Nothing has to address one main problem: How to make believable and acceptable Hero's passive and grateful acceptance back of the fiancé who, on the flimsiest of evidence, so brutally denounced her in public, at the altar on her wedding day.

Indeed I have never seen a production without nurturing a momentary hope she will give his second proposal of marriage a two-word answer, the second word being "off".

The 1918 setting makes this even harder to pull off. It was the year women got the vote in Britain - only women over 30, it is true. 

But, while Britain was still a patriarchal society, women were not handed over to their future husbands by their fathers like cattle in the way Hero is handed to Claudio.

Rebecca Collingwood's charming but passive Hero smiles and simpers her way through the play. There's not much else to be done, it seems to me. Tunji Kasim does his best to make Claudio's stupidity believable.

The villain of the piece, the man who frames Hero, is Don John. I have always thought him one of the most interesting characters in Much Ado About Nothing, and he is here given a World War One injury that requires him to use a crutch.

Sam Alexander plays him quietly and makes him intriguing as well as menacing. But why is his brother Don Pedro played by someone - John Hodgkinson - who seems, though a fine actor, to be easily old enough to be his brother's father? 

There are many good things about this production of one of Shakespeare's best comedies, but there is too much wrong with it to merit more than an amber light.    

Review Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare

The Lost Boys
https://www.rsc.org.uk/haymarket

Set in the last heady summer before the First World War, this exquisitely designed production of Shakespeare's early comedy Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Christopher Luscombe, is now presented as a delicious Christmas confection, part of a double bill with Much Ado About Nothing.

Determined to create his own celibate male academic haven, the King of Navarre (Sam Alexander) persuades his comrades to join him in his stately home where he sets up his own personal Oxbridge with turretted ivory towers, ordering all women to be kept at bay.

At the heart of the play is a hierarchy of lovers as the best laid plans come to naught. The King and the Princess of France (Leah Whittaker). The King's bluff confidante Berowne (Edward Bennett) and the French noblewoman Rosaline (Lisa Dillon).

The Kiplingesque bespectacled Longaville (William Belchambers) and the French Katharine (Rebecca Collingwood) and aesthete Dumaine hankering after Maria (Paige Carter).  Then Costard (Nick Haverson), an aproned buffoon of a gardener, yet not to be underestimated, and the affected Spanish fop Don Armado (John Hodgkinson) vying for the love of milkmaid Jaquenetta (Emma Manton).

This elegantly-costumed version with musical score by Nigel Hess and live orchestra fuses a whole plethora of literary, variety, theatre and film influences. Gosford Park rather than Downton Abbey with music in the style of Ivor Novello, Noel Coward and Gilbert and Sullivan. 

There is also a touch of The Importance of Being Earnest in the archness of the Princess of France and her female entourage, dollops of Brideshead Revisited (or maybe its inspiration, the Evelyn Waugh/John Betjeman Oxford set), echoes of Peter Pan  and even some zany Marx Brothers' antics with a glancing reference also to the Edwardian epitome of male physical prowess, Eugen Sandow.

Nevertheless the Shakespearean verse still shines through and it's an enjoyable lucid production with the Edwardian environment thought through but spreading its net further. Moth (Peter McGovern) has the look of a Winslow Boy naval cadet while Costard, the bowls' playing parson (John Arthur), schoolmaster Holofernes and constable Dull could have stepped out of The Vicar of Dibley.

Designer Simon Higlett's handsome stately home and halcyon outdoor sets provide a handsome and vibrant backdrop with lighting by Oliver Fenwick. There are some curious contrasts stemming from the wide variety of references, with a touch of modern alternative comedy thrown in, and the polished singing.

But this hardly matters in a bright and breezy production until the final moments when it switches to the poignant. It's a populist winning production, and we award a sparkling Christmas bauble of a bright green light

Review King John

King John

by William Shakespeare

Game of Thrones

https://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/

TLT and her loyal motorised lieutenant made all haste to the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames to see King John, a Shakespeare we had never seen before, at the Rose Theatre.

Even before reading the programme after seeing the play, and finding it was the first Shakespeare to be filmed in 1899, both TLT and her faithful equerry agreed King John has all the elements of a stonking melodrama and political mini-series!

The weak and vacillating king (Jamie Ballard) is dependent on advisers, especially his mother, veteran schemer but still careful Elinor of Aquitaine (Maggie Steed). But the King when left to make decisions on his own, in an effort to stand on his own feet, takes a brutal and murderous misstep.

The victim of this, young boy Arthur (played on press night by Sebastian Croft), a prince by demeanour and blood, pleading for his life reduces the would-be assassin (a bluntly honourable Stephen Kennedy) to tears. 

Arthur's tragic mother Constance (Lisa Dillon) is a power player for her son but ultimately driven mad by grief and grievance. Meanwhile swashbuckling bastard son Philip Faulconbridge (Howard Charles) of Richard the Lionheart is a cynical but heartbroken looker on,  participant and commentator.

This is a production of great clarity in what could be otherwise a confusing play. The nearest we have to a hero is Faulconbridge. Yet this doesn't quite fit and perhaps the clue is in the title of a play upon which Shakespeare drew heavily, some would say rewrote in a "twice told tale": The Troublesome Reign of King John.

For this, it struck us, is a situation tragedy - the troublesome situation of "that England hedged in with the main/The water-walled bulwark" plagued by uncertainty over the throne and land rights. 

And it's rather exciting, mined for humour as well in Trevor Nunn's well-paced (even though it should be said approximately three hours long) production.

Don't look for the Magna Carta though in Shakespeare's version, although perhaps a cloth underfoot rolled out like a parchment at the beginning is a twenty first century gesture towards it.

But this is Shakespeare at his most politic, meanng the play does not disturb the Elizabethan world order, the divine right to rule of the Protestant Tudors implicitly compared with the chaos of the Plantagenet Catholics. 

Nevertheless it is this which gives the play its modern feel. The shifting alliances and plotting of the unstable in power have a relevant resonance. Pandulph the Papal legate (Burt Caesar) has all the deviousness and diplomacy of a corrupt FIFA official, whose European power politics on behalf of the Pope sets off family rifts and wars between English and French.

A seemingly straightforward Globe-like stage with scaffolding to insert more levels is given a sense of time travelling and mash up with two video screens, one on each side (set and costumes by Mark Friend with concept design by John Napier). Describing it makes it sound more clunky than it is for the audience, as the actors' phrase goes, caught up "in the moment".

The screens show stills of stone turrets, discarded amour on a desolate battlefield, medieval illuminated manuscript illustrations and paintings, stained glass figures and as the King grows more fragile, delicate blossoming trees.

There is also sparing but effective use of video - a kingly debate flashes on the screens in close up well serving a play full of competing claims. Public events are publicly broadcast and the battles are in stark black and white like some Eisenstein silent film.

An otherwise plot driven artificial incident to modern eyes,  yet, in our modern times, also too horribly true, is shown as a vertigo black silhouetted figure falling from on high.

The rhyming couplets rang out clearly and every character carried their weight in the play with the, again, straightforward but ratcheting-up-the-tension use of sound effects (Fergus O'Hare) - the drum roll, the ticking clock - and music (composer Corin Buckeridge).

Ballard's King John has stepped straight out of medieval painting with his pigeon chested bearing. Gradually as his power waxes and wanes, his nervous gestures augment and his mouth is increasingly down-turned in the manner of the best silent films. This style suits the build up to the supernatural visions of the play  but his end, in a wheelchair, drooling, also had a touching quality.

The Prince Arthur  (he's the son of John's elder brother Geoffrey so has a claim to the throne) of Croft also has the touching embarrassment of the boy whose widowed mother is fighting his corner. 

This play also provides some powerful roles for women, seasoned politician Elinor, determined yet doomed Constance and Princess Blanche of Castille (Elizabeth Hopper) who finds herself torn from her nearest family on her wedding day as events,  triggered by Cardinal Pandulph, twist and turn.

All in all, King John proved a compelling and absorbing evening, with every argument over claims to the throne, the possession of mainland France territories, the plotting and the scheming followed intently by TLT and her trusty mechanized steed. So for an evening of national and international upheaval a jousting green light