Much Ado About Nothing
Olivier Theatre Winter 2007-2008

This is a thoroughly enjoyable production of one of Shakespeare's most delightful romantic comedies. If I gave out stars, it would get four out of five, the only reservation being that it misses some key opportunities to be even better.

This is the one about the feuding couple, Benedick and Beatrice. His friends tell him she secretly loves him, her friends tell her the same about him, and so naturally . . . .

Director Nicholas Hytner gives the tale an added depth by casting a pair of actors who are, let us say, not in the first blush of youth, Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker. This is not a wholly original idea, and there are even some things in the text that hint at it, but it does work, nicely mellowing the humour with the warm sense of a last chance fortunately grasped.

(Indeed, many of the best things in this production have been done before, though rarely as well as here.)

Both stars are expert comedians and master speakers of the verse, making their characters clear, real and fully available to us - and that is no small accomplishment. And so it may be a bit unfair of me to hold them up to their own very high standards and say that I had hoped for more from one of them than we get here.

Simon Russell Beale may just possibly be the finest classical actor of his generation. He is, let us admit, not a matinee idol type, but one of his greatest strengths is his ability to discover that Uncle Vanya or even Hamlet is actually a rumpled, chubby little man ill at ease in his own body.

I don't mean to say that he plays every role the same, rather that he sensitively and legitimately finds ways to use his instrument to bring out qualities written into the roles that other actors have missed, enriching our perception of the characters.

And so, perhaps unfairly, I anticipated his discovering in the cynical Benedick a man who had given up on love because he assumed himself unlovable, and who would now be given entry to a world he thought closed to him.

And he doesn't do that. Indeed, beyond the moments of humour and seriousness inescapable in the text, he gives us no real character at all. I repeat that even a surface performance from him is better than what most actors can deliver, but I can't help missing what might have been.

This is especially true because Zoe Wanamaker does go that extra step in fleshing out Beatrice. Working from hints in the text, she gives us a full backstory for Beatrice, who loved Benedick in the past, had her heart broken, and still carries a torch behind her shield of cynical wit. So her story is of a second chance she is almost afraid to trust.

Put another way, when he overhears (in a scene set up by the others so that he will overhear them) that she loves him, he's mildly surprised. When she experiences the parallel scene, she's thrilled. And that makes all the difference, colouring our sense of both of them.

Incidentally, those two eavesdropping scenes, in which the listeners try to hide from speakers who know they're there, are among the funniest in all of Shakespeare, and all I need say is that there is a deep pool of water onstage . . . .

The subplot is a more serious one about a groom falsely convinced his bride is unchaste. That couple always pale in comparison to Benedick and Beatrice and it is no serious criticism to say that Daniel Hawksford and Susannah Fielding aren't able to do much to bring them alive, except that it would have been nice if they had somehow managed it.

Oliver Ford Davies does make more of the bride's father than most, inhabiting him with real personality and passion, though the low-comedy watchmen are as unfunny as they almost always are (another chance missed to rise above the norm), except for Trevor Peacock's scene-stealing Verges.

So what we have is a production that is at its weakest as good as any, and at its best better than most, whose only disappointments are the hints that it could have been even better.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Much Ado About Nothing - National 2007