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 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.