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 Les Blancs

Les Blancs

by Lorraine Hansberry

Circling The Wagons

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

In an unnamed African colony, sits a skeletal missionary building, the beleaguered inhabitants of which are sitting out the last days of Empire clinging to their faith in medical science, religion and their reason for being there.

With its backdrop of the vast African landscape, Les Blancs, was put together  posthumously by writer Lorraine Hansberry's ex husband Robert Nemiroff  from her notes and drafts after her premature death from cancer in 1965.

Best-known for A Raisin In The Sun - in some ways a response to Clifford Odets' Awake and Sing!, this work with its anthropological sounding title is a riposte to Jean Genet's   Les Nègres, clownerie (The Negros, the clown show) .

The settlers, no longer pioneers but oppressors, and the nomadic Africans are joined by an American journalist (Elliot Cowan) and, separately, Tshembe (Danny Sapani) who, on the death of his father, has returned to his homeland from London where he has studied at university and taken part in an independence movement.

An unfinished play, it's first performance was in 1970, five years' after the writer's death, and, while it has an epic sweep, the patchwork is somewhat roughly stitched and, for us, the joins do show.

It's probably a moot point what were the playwright's original intentions, especially as the paucity of female voices is noticeable. Apart that is from the roles of Madame Neilsen (Siân Phillips), the mission's blind  matriarch, and Marta (Anna Madeley), the practical medic - surely a shoe-in movie role for actress Ingrid Bergman? 

So it's an uneven piece, with a rather conventional first act bringing in a recognizable structure, both covering colonialism and the history of literature. There are touches of Henrik Ibsen, George Bernard Shaw and Eugene O'Neill.

Nevertheless, the staging by South African director Yaël Farber with designer Soutra Gilmour, using the full resources of the Olivier stage, brings another dimension. 

Recently there has been a fad for revolving stages in traditional theatres which, to be honest, has irritated the hell out of TLT and her own bush companion. But we've never quite clarified to ourselves exactly why until we saw the apt use on the huge - and we mean huge - Olivier stage. Other theatres are just far too small to do full justice to a revolve and allow the audience clear sightlines.

Here it works to spectacular effect,  giving a full HD treatment to a vast symbolic African horizon with its changing light and seasons. The  onion layered revolve blows up the dust from the arid ground while the tall, stooping, skeletal African figure of "The Woman" (Sheila Atim) lopes across the vista.  

The play itself has a kickback in the second act which takes it away from the neater dichotomies before the interval.  

Throughout there are also glimpses of an intricate, shifting structure, still in progress, encompassing the history of America and its relationship to colonialism as well as a history of Africa and European exploitation.   

Yet the major strand of the mixed race child Eric (Tunji Kasim) feels undeveloped - or maybe, more accurately, truncated - if still vital.

This production blew TLT and her jalopy  away with its unforgettable staging and the soundscape from the Ngqoko singers (music director Joyce Moholoagae) . 

But it also left us with major thorny questions, principally about the author's intent, thrown up by the history of this play and the place of it within the National Theatre's season. At the same time, TLT, as an audience member "in the moment", cannot deny the undoubted power of this production with all its visceral qualities. A green light.