 | Much Ado About Nothing |  |
"What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living?" Act I, scene i
Written: 1599
OVO at The Maltings Arts Theatre ; June 25, 2009 St. Albans, UK
Director : Imogen de la Bere ; Starring : Edmund White, Anna Franklin, Faith Turner, Howard Branch, Will Franklin, Richard Cowling, Dewi Williams, David Widdowson
Reviewed on : 2009-06-27 08:06:51 ; Reviewed by : Wendy Attwell
| Set in 1945, just as the troops are coming home and victory is being celebrated, this Much Ado is well-placed to be joyous and full of fun. The stage is set quite simply with benches and chairs, a canteen menu advertises spam sandwiches, and the ubiquitous ‘Keep calm and carry on’ poster hangs alongside a modern variation – ‘Keep calm and make tea’.
The show begins on a song – ‘(There'll Be Bluebirds Over) The White Cliffs of Dover’ – sung by Hero, Beatrice and Margaret as they sew Union Flag bunting, with accompaniment by Leonato and Ursula. This makes for a rather emotionally charged beginning, encapsulating the intensity of feeling of these characters, and showing their personal investment in this war and its victory. This is something that is often flung aside in productions of Much Ado, but which here adds an extra layer of depth to the proceedings.
I was surprised to find that this is very much a musical production, using fairly well-known 1940s tunes throughout to complement and explain the action, and also as standalone pieces purely for entertainment. ‘Sigh no more, Ladies’ is replaced with ‘You always hurt the one you love’ - later reprised by Claudio and company singing it at Hero’s tomb. ‘Let’s face the music and dance’ is used to show the liaison between Borachio and Margaret, and suggests a true affection between the pair. ‘Over the Rainbow’ (riffed on throughout the play) is sung by Hero, removing her veil after she has been disgraced at her wedding. Richard Cowling as Don John does a wonderful Noel Coward impression with ‘Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans’, and Faith Turner and Lucy Crick put on a lovely show with an old-fashioned song-and-dance routine of ‘Don’t sit under the apple tree’. The music captures and enhances the feel of the era and sits perfectly neatly alongside the Shakespearean text. James Pitchford provides piano accompaniment to the singers, all of whom perform their song and dance routines admirably.
This play has a solid cast, with most of the actors having proved their worth in previous OVO productions. Anna Franklin (formerly Anna MacLeod) is a Beatrice with depth and a history. Strong, outspoken, and full of mirth, she also has a secret melancholy that brings her close to tears. As she sits alone listening to a sad love song we see the yearning in her eyes, before she hastily switches off the record as someone else enters the room. Her scenes with Benedick span from intense tenderness (touching their foreheads together as he comforts her) to fiery venom (‘Kill Claudio!’). Anna Franklin is flawless in her performance and is, as always, a joy to watch. Edmund White is a good-natured and rather gentle Benedick, whose quarrels with Beatrice leave him slightly bemused. White has good comic timing and I feel that he is somewhat cheated by the lack of comedic devices used in Benedick’s gulling scene. The gulling scenes often get the biggest laughs of the play, and whilst Beatrice at least has a screen to make use of (the bulk of the scene is – unusually - focused on Hero and Margaret blowing up balloons), Benedick merely gets to hide behind a wooden stand and knock it slightly at one point. This seems to be down to a lack of imagination in the direction of the scene and is rather a missed opportunity.
We often see Hero portrayed as weak and vulnerable, but Faith Turner plays her as a woman who has survived the war, and who has probably worked hard to get done whatever needed doing whilst the men were away. Even when disgraced at her wedding she does not immediately swoon with grief, but slowly hyperventilates herself into a faint. However, refreshing as it may be, her strength of character doesn’t sit so well with her acceptance of Claudio as a husband, especially since we are not shown any prior mutual attraction between the two. Claudio (Howard Branch) is also rather a puzzle. Rather than a moody young man, Branch plays Claudio as bashful, thoughtful, melancholic, and – well, a bit of a self-pitying drip with a slightly creepy edge. This interpretation has its strengths and weaknesses. By showing his sensitive side, Branch fully brings out the poetry of the lover’s words that Claudio speaks. And when he pushes Hero away he does it in tears. But I cannot see this man being the soldier that Benedick speaks of, nor the kind of man who would win this particular interpretation of Hero. And would such a melancholic be laughing about the death of his ex-bride? Whilst I cannot fault the performance of either Branch or Turner, I do question the sense of matching two such atypical interpretations within one production.
Richard Cowling as Don John steals the show from his brother Don Pedro (Will Franklin). Camping it up slightly, Cowling easily achieves the right balance between serious bad guy and archetypal evil villain. Dewi Williams as Leonato with his pipe and newspaper, is a slightly bumbling, old-fashioned father, and one for which we can feel fondness. Williams stumbled several times over his lines, but managed to cover fairly well because of the way he was playing the character. He also ad-libbed rather freely, and this no doubt also helped cover any mistakes! Margaret Metcalf as Ursula played to the same tone, but had even more problems with her lines, and wasn’t so adept at recovering herself.
There are some nice comedy turns from Dogberry, Verges and Borachio, all playing the comedy at rather different levels but somehow managing to make it work together. David Widdowson as Dogberry isn’t the pretentious middle-management Constable that we are used to, but a down-to-earth and under-appreciated fellow who just wants some credit for his hard work. Verges, highly caricatured by Will Saunders, stammers and lisps, staggers, and rolls his eyes in an approximation of feeble-mindedness. His performance was over-the-top funny but I wasn’t entirely sure I should have been laughing at it! Kieran Cummins – always good at the comedy – uses the smaller moments to get his laughs: pausing mid-sentence because his drink isn’t full, trying to steal money from under Don John’s nose, demonstrating his deception with Margaret with the aid of a stuffed guy dressed as Hitler. We all know that Borachio is the bad guy, but as played by Cummins we can’t help but like him. I was rather pleased when he finally shrugged off his chains and was reunited with an ecstatic Margaret. Philip Lawford also deserves a mention here, for playing three roles and for having such a marvellous singing voice!
Using an almost full text seems to have overstretched the production somewhat, and I felt that it could have done with some rather drastic editing. Company numbers are limited, and even with some doubling of roles, some characters have of necessity been cut from the play. It would make sense therefore, to also cut some of the lines of these characters. Instead, their lines are given to different characters, and whilst this works on some occasions (Ursula taking the lines of the Messenger in Act I Scene I, and her and Leonato taking it in turns to read aloud from the newspaper of the return of the troops), in other instances if falls flat as actors are overburdened with lines not their own. The part of Leonato’s brother, Antonio, has been cut, substituting Ursula as his sister instead, and whilst this works perfectly well in principle, in practice it isn’t so well thought out. In Act V Scene I Ursula takes Antonio’s lines, and whilst effort has been made to play up the comedy in this scene by means of Ursula threatening Claudio with a tiny pair of scissors, her rant goes on for so long that the comedy dies a death. In Act IV Ursula is given the Friar’s lines: a decision that makes little sense either textually, or in terms of direction, since the Friar is present throughout this scene. In general I felt that the direction was rather sloppy, with certain scenes set up rather oddly, some of the physical comedy undeveloped, and the production itself slightly uneven. That there was more than a months break between the first and second run of shows couldn’t have helped matters, but whilst most of the actors were as polished as ever, others let their lack of rehearsal show.
Taken as a whole, I have to say that I enjoyed the play, despite its flaws. This was due in no small part to the professionalism of most of the cast and the passion with which they performed. The play ends with a full cast rendition of ‘There’ll always be an England’, complete with flag-waving and the sense of heart-swelling patriotism that such a show engenders, even if it is performed slightly tongue-in-cheek. ‘There’ll always be an England’ sing the cast, to which I can wholeheartedly add, that I hope there will always be an OVO.
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Sir John Gilbert, R.A.,
Beatrice and Benedick
Reviews
|  | Royal Shakespeare Company
November 3, 2009 |  | British Shakespeare Company
July 31, 2009 |  | OVO at The Maltings Arts Theatre
June 25, 2009 |  | Regents Park Open Air Theatre
June 1, 2009 |  | Lord Chamberlain’s Men
July 2, 2008 |  | Stadttheater Bern
April 12, 2008 |  | Wide Eyed Productions
March 2, 2008 |  | Redshift Theatre at UH Arts
October 17, 2007 | | Pirate Utopia
November 15, 2006 |  | Stratford Festival of Canada
August 3, 2006 |  | Royal Shakespeare Company
May 22, 2006 |  | Chicago Shakespeare Theatre
December 19, 2005 |  | BBC TV
November 7, 2005 |  | Signal Ensemble Theatre
August 23, 2003 |  | Spandauer Sommerfestspiele
1998 |
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