Much Ado About Nothing
Olivier Theatre, London SE1
The morning before I saw Nicholas Hytner's joyful production of Shakespeare's comedy I happened to be interviewing Felicity Kendal, who played Beatrice in Elijah Moshinsky's 1989 version. Beatrice is a cousin to Hero, one of the playwright's still-to-be deflowered maids, so she may be a little older than her, but not so very much so. Yet Kendal was 43 when she played her. And Alan Bates, as her sparring partner Benedick, would have made, at 55, an extremely old "young lord of Padua". What, I asked Kendal, did Bates do about Benedick's famous line "The world must be peopled"? "Say it very quickly, I should think," she replied.
On paper, the National's new production has an even more acute age problem with its merrily warring Benedick and Beatrice. Simon Russell Beale is 47, while Zoë Wanamaker is 58, an age that would truly take Beatrice down to the IVF clinic if her reluctant beau were in earnest about "peopling". But Beale does not gabble the line - he gets a laugh out of it. And his casting, as is Wanamaker's, proves to be inspired.
It would have been, whatever the two actors' ages. Beale has successfully played Hamlet and Uncle Vanya, but his short, ramshackle body and large plastic face are built for comedy. Wanamaker, although a fine Shakespearean actress, is loved for her sitcom My Family. Both bring tremendous comedic physicality to the stage. Beale, eavesdropping on the plotters as they fool him into believing Beatrice is in love with him, tries to hide his substantial torso behind a very thin post (a visual metaphor for how we often fool ourselves that we have hidden our true selves from others). Wanamaker, in her parallel scene, prowls felinely behind a wall.
But the actors' maturity makes sense of their characters' cynicism; both have clearly been to too many parties and had their handbags stolen too many times - specifically by each other in a previous romance. In a play where everyone behaves very foolishly, their scepticism comes close to earned wisdom, and allows them to treat even their own prejudices with caution.
For Claudio, Hero's fiancé, love is a binary, on-off matter. Not for Beatrice or Benedick, who have to think themselves into it. As Beatrice responds when he declares himself to her: "I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing." Wanamaker delivered the line, which comes after Claudio's renunciation of Hero at the wedding service, and the audience, in the grip of winter agues, stopped coughing for five whole minutes.
This is not to deny that the sight of these two wits slipping on love's banana skin was very funny. Indeed, the falling part of falling in love has rarely been more literally rendered. Benedick, about to be discovered by the others, plunges into a swimming pool invisible to the audience in the pricier seats, who explode with laughter. Emerging, he does not, obviously, mention his extra-textual drubbing, but that just emphasises how his heart has suffered a much greater shock from the news that Beatrice loves him. Beatrice later repeats the pratfall. It is less funny and probably a mistake, but at least shows they are in it together.
To say these two Bs steal the show is not to say much: they always steal the play from Claudio and Hero, the one a feckless prig hand and the other a virgin with hardly anything to say about being wronged. Neither Daniel Hawksford nor Susannah Fielding found, I fear, much to do with their parts. Oliver Ford Davies was his usual brilliantly enunciated self, however, as Hero's father. Mark Addy, who bared his bottom in The Full Monty, proved a delightful ass as Dogberry, and Trevor Peacock as Verges got laughs sniffing the ass's arse.
Hytner's production, staged on a revolving timbered stage bathed in Sicilian sunlight, perhaps lacks both the dark centre of a perfect Much Ado and the feminist sensibility of a modern one (has Benedick tamed a shrew with marriage?). But it brought a splash of summer to this critic's January. As for my menopausal concerns - like Beatrice, who here stuffs her mockable love letter down her own throat, I eat my words.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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