Much Ado About Nothing: much ado about Shakespeare

While I love Shakespeare, I’m not always comfortable with the unquestioning adulation that he’s accorded in our culture. I don’t for a minute buy the argument that somehow he created modern consciousness (as Harold Bloom contends). Nor do I believe that every word he wrote is somehow sacred. So many people (mostly academics) spend so much time trying to get to the definitive Shakespeare text, yet it’s an impossible task and virtually a fool’s errand. In part because of the forms of transmission we have for his texts are so unreliable (whether it was people frantically copying them down during performance or taken from the memories of actors – we’re not even sure in many cases).  I also suspect that he just didn’t care; texts were never intended to be set in stone but are rather plastic and able to be remoulded for each production. I suspect that the reason Shakespeare enthrals Bloom and other academics is precisely because he is so elusive.

There is something casual about Shakespeare and my own admiration for the guy lies in the instinctive genius he had for marshalling material and using imagery to deepen thematic content. His work never feels over determined, if anything it usually looks rather sloppy. With the odd exception – Hamlet being the most notable as a text he returned to again and again – it’s almost as if he just flung his ideas down on the page and then moved swiftly onto the next scene and then onto the next project. Of course the nature of Elizabethan theatre would have lent itself to this sort of in-the-moment creation. You could fling up a production, see how it ran, give it a few tweaks if you felt it was worthwhile doing again or simply move on to the next show if it wasn’t. As a consequence, there wasn’t the same sense of personal investment that theatre artists now make in each single production.

As theatre has become more rarefied it has also become more risk-adverse. The vast majority of plays receive a single, short run and are never heard from again. I can’t think of a playwright who wouldn’t love the opportunity to have a show produced, see what’s working and what’s not and have it produced again until everything is running smoothly. This would seem to be a natural form of evolution for a playtext. Sadly, for this to be achieved, theatre would actually need to return to its pre-rarefied state of popular entertainment. Interestingly enough the only place I know of this happening to any degree is when a company decides to tour a Fringe show across the country. From what I can gather, Montreal, the start of the circuit, usually gets the coal, while Vancouver at the end, gets the diamond. Oh, and Tom Stoppard seems to be able to screw around with his texts as well – but then he’s Tom Stoppard.

So what, in the name of God, does this have to do with Bard on the Beach’s production of Much Ado About Nothing? Well, just that Much Ado provides abundant evidence for my thesis. Here we have what would normally be the supporting older couple – Benedick and Beatrice – utterly dominating proceedings. You can just imagine Shakespeare unable to stop the flow of ideas as the couple bicker. Then, for the younger couple, Claudio and Hero, who you’d normally expect to be at the centre of the action, he paints himself into a dreadful corner with Hero, who, after feigning her own death (as you do under the guidance of a Friar, it worked so well for Juliet), quite happily marries the idiotic knob who publicly denounced her on their aborted wedding day. While I’m happy to hear arguments that women weren’t so empowered during Shakespeare’s time to turn down an utter goof like Claudio (despite having a woman as the head of state for a large chunk of Shakespeare’s life), I would counter that having a powerful creature like Beatrice merrily battling through the society undermines that position somewhat.

All of this makes Much Ado a tricky play to produce – especially in times like ours where we seem to require characters to go through clearly defined journeys that follow a set pattern of psychological and emotional growth.  Whether intended or not (and I suspect it was intended), there is a lot of darkness in this play. The strutting men return from war, ready to reassert themselves in a feminized environment by plotting against each other, goofing around and abusing the women.  But this sits uneasily with the tra-la-la, tra-la-la nature of the rest of it – or at least it sits uneasily for us in the 21st century.

So what’s a director to do? Well, Dean Paul Gibson decides to focus on the froth and bury the dark and I can’t really fault him for this. After all, this is Bard and part of Bard is about watching the sunset through the giant hole in the tent and admiring boats sitting on the still water (and, on the night I attended, listen to the unwelcome intrusions of emergency services helicopters and sirens – anyone else notice that the city’s been kind of edgy these last few weeks?). There is something light about Bard, despite Artistic Director’s Christopher Gaze’s laudable attempts in recent years to move the programming into darker territory. It is also a particularly dark season this summer with Much Ado sharing the stage with Tony and Cleo and the history plays (in various forms) taking over the studio tent shortly.

So, if I had been in Gibson’s shoes I probably would have gone after the light and airy too but there is something still a bit melancholy about this for choice for me. The true heart of Much Ado (as unfocussed as it often is) is the relationship between Benedick and Beatrice. There is probably no finer squabbling couple in English theatre (well, George and Martha from Whose Afraid of Virginia Woolf would give them a run for their money) and I adore them both. Although their hearts might not be black, they are certainly marbled with greys. Those mottled colours are thankfully always redeemed by flecks of gold. They are also a sort of beacon of hope to middle aged cynics, of whichever sex, everywhere.  

In an ideal world, a director builds Much Ado around the casting of these two. With Jennifer Lines, Gibson has someone who was basically born to play this role. Her take on Beatrice is sharp and refined and she has fun in a Katherine Hepburn kind of way of having fun. A sort of New England Beatrice, you could say. While John Murphy – as usual – is tremendous value on the comedic side of things, particularly during the intrigue that he falls afoul of (his friends, tired of the squabbling couple, set up the erstwhile lovers to finally get it on), I felt he was missing some of the easy wit that is so central to the character. Benedick is not a fool (well, he’s not emotionally wise, but intellectually he’s one sharp costumer).  I found Murphy strays a little too much into the comedy and maybe he’ll find a more even path as the run progresses. Perhaps more important I didn’t really get a sense of chemistry between the two performers. They seemed like unlikely lovers but that’s just DNA (or more correctly my distant pheromonal perception from the middle of the tent), nothing anyone can do about that.

The rest of the cast do, by and large, strong work although as often happens at Bard a number of performers do struggle with the language. For their part, Andrew Wheeler and Martin Sims are so at ease and their words ring out so crisply and clearly that I longed to see them given more meatier roles to chew on (Wheeler, of course, gets to show his chops as Antony which should be something to see).

Dogberry (Simon Bradbury) and the night guard provide the slapstick/mechanical relief and Gibson and his team have a lot of fun. While Bradbury’s creation is pretty wonderful – in a shouting, Dad’s Army kind of way – he does overwhelm the intrinsic humour of a character famous for delivering a stream of increasingly bizarre malapropisms (hmm. It never occurred to me that Dogberry is foil to the wittier - and more aristocratic Benedick and Beatrice - there you go, Shakespeare providing these sorts of echoes in the work and it all looks so unforced).  

The production is set in Italy in the early part of the 20th century but there seems to be an abundance of Spanish influence and Flamenco dancing. The set by Drew Facey is lovely and cascades with vibrant, colourful flowers. The costumes by Mara Gottler are fantastic. Gottler is one of those designers who is so consistently excellent that I’m afraid I often neglect to mention how excellent she is because you just, well, kind of expect it. It would be more notable if she did something average than superb and her costumes are one of the annual highlights of Bard.