I sit down in the theater and realize that I can't remember which play Much Ado About Nothing is. The one with the twins? The one where the lady dresses up as the man? The other one with the twins?
It's actually the one about Jealousy. No, not that one -- the other one.
It's a strange, artificial play. Any wise-guy can say that Shakespeare's comedies are not funny. The truth is that the whole idea of "comedy", and indeed, the whole idea of "theater" has changed since Good Queen Bess ruled the land. Hamlet and Henry V are recognizable human beings who do the kinds of things we would do their situations, only more so. The Winters Tale and the Tempest are all about illusions. We are put into a world where of course someone will leave their beloved at the altar as a result of the most transparent deception.
"Well, well" says Leonato "You jilted my daughter on her wedding day, causing her to drop dead of grief; but I accept that you didn't really mean it, and it just so happens that she has an identical cousin; so if you agree to marry the cousin we'll call it quits. Oh and by the way, she'll come to the wedding in a veil, so you won't know what she looks like until you are already married. "Ok, fine" says Claudio.
I think Shakespeare and his audience expected plays to be full of ludicrous (=playful) contrivance. What would be the point of playing your groat to watch actors doing something believable?
For the last 20 years, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory has been the cultural highlight of the Bristol year, the one thing that anyone with a passing interest in theater would never miss. (The Narrator of Rumpelstiltskin at the New Rooms quipped that the audience would have all seen the Miller at the Tobacco Factory and the ripple of laughter indicated that most of us had.) But last year's gender swapped Henry V left me afraid that they had mislaid their mojo. There comes a point at which you stop "interpreting a work by Shakespeare" and start "making up a completely new play using some of Shakespeare's words". The conflation of the Dauphin and Princess Kate into a single bondage-queen seemed to have transgressed that line.
Thankfully, Much Ado feels very much like a return to form. No high concepts. No production ideas. No radical departures. Detailed, clear readings of Shakespeare's text; every character well drawn and the difficult scenes that some companies cut or skate over work-shopped to death until it makes sense. Back in 2003 they made Troilus and Cressida very nearly watchable.
Much Ado embraces the problem play's problems. The whole thing is set in modern dress and played naturalistically. There are some mobile phones and some pop music and some cheeky ad libs. The weddings are conducted by an army chaplain, in khaki, but everyone calls him Friar. The set-piece masked ball becomes a fancy dress disco in which everyone is dressed as a superhero. (Leonato, dressed as Robin, even improvises some "kapows" and "soks".)
At the centre of the play, Beatrice and Benedick. make a great show of disliking each other and the whole idea of marriage, and are manipulated into falling and love and getting married by the end of Act V. Dorothea Myer-Bennett and Geoffrey Lumb are so luminously good that Ms Guardian Theater-Critic wrote the whole thing off as the Beatrice and Bendedick show. Benedick delivers his cutting barbs with a grin and Beatrice gives hers with a suppressed giggle; she literally takes herself by surprise when she admits to being in love. And then takes the audience by surprise by telling Benedick to "kill Claudio" in deadly earnest.
There is no attempt to distance or mitigate the artificial or archaic aspects of the play. When Leonato is angry he is really angry; when Beatrice wishes she was a man, she means it; Claudio is convincingly heart-broken at Hero's tomb genuinely joyful when she draws back the veil and reveals that -- spoilers follow -- she is alive after all. The cast bring on gigantic plastic letters spelling out the word "love" for the curtain call. The audience seems delighted. I don't believe a word of it and I don't think anyone would think of putting it on if it wasn't by Shakespeare. But it is.
2 comments:
The Joss Weedon movie version is well worth checking out, in part because during the script-writer's strike he was able to call upon actors from a number of his favourite shows to film a movie in his home and garden, the script-writer having been dead for several centuries. Claudio as geeky rather than good-looking makes his gulling slightly more plausible: he just knows that a hot girl is not going to stay faithful to someone like him. Casting one of Don John's henchman as female and both as young also works: they come across more as stoned student pranksters than serious villains. I will spare you a review of the Mexican Revolution version that Vicki & I saw at the Globe, though 'Mr Berry' the American movie maker worked well on a number of levels.
"At the centre of the play, Beatrice and Benedick. make a great show of disliking each other and the whole idea of marriage, and are manipulated into falling and love and getting married by the end of Act V."
The strange thing about Much Ado — one of the very few Shakespeare plays that I know pretty well — is that no manipulation really happens, or is needed. As soon as Beatrice and Benedick are successfully persuaded of what is already the truth — that each loves the other — their contrived mutual hostility is ended, and they are ready to marry. It's actually all rather anticlimactic. And yet, there is still something magical and a little bit heartbreaking about the moment when Benedick drops the mask and says "I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?" Despite its lack of substance, there's no doubt that their plot thread steals the show from poor Hero and Claudio ever time.
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