There’s so much to love in a Much Ado in Mexico
LIFE at Shakespeare’s Globe is going to be a lot quieter when artistic director Emma Rice leaves at the end of the season.
Miss Rice has been dumped for being too modern (the Globe board wants a more ersatz-Elizabethan approach). Her regime’s latest offering, a jaunty Much Ado set in early 20th-century Mexico, shows just how far her cheeky approach stands from that of the wan bores who have deposed her.
Where the heritage-Shakespeare crowd might have wanted ruff collars and straightforward voice-projection, this romp has ponchos, sombreros, machine-gun belts, a goods train, sound-amplification and tweaks to the text.
Messina has become Monterrey. Reference to ‘a young Florentine named Claudio’ has become ‘a young chihuahua named Claudio’.
The villainous Don Juan has become a woman in black cowboy-style outfit. Like some of the other nobles, she rides a puppet horse which is little more than a pair of stilts.
Comic character Dogberry, instead of being the local constable, is now an American movie director who catches the baddies’ plotting on film and plays this back on a screen to prove what they have been up to. At this point some of you will groan and say: ‘Why can’t they just do Shakespeare traditionally?’
I hope you know me well enough after all these years to realise I am no trendy neophile and therefore accept my word that it works well.
THE reason it succeeds is that it remains true to Shakespeare’s generous vision of a world where love conquers cynicism and where, even in a war, people find their internal barriers eroded by romance.
And it is also done, as most of the shows at the Rice Globe have been, with an authentic professionalism.
Beatriz Romilly and Matthew Needham make a mid- 30s Beatrice and Benedick, slender and efficient, their love poems tickled along with additional lines rhyming ‘senorita’ with ‘healthy eater’.
The purists will say ‘ that’s not authentic’. No, it’s not. But it fits and the crowd loved it.
Gifted Ewan Wardrop just about makes the Dogberry idea work, but this is the weakest part of the modernisation. Steve John Shepherd’s Don Pedro, agreeably leathery, plays up his disappointment that Beatrice does not fancy him. Martin Marquez’s Leonate has an eyepatch and a limp. Anya Chalotra’s Hero sings wistfully.
Old-timers will find plenty of touches to make them see Much Ado in a fresh light. Shakespeare newcomers will thrill to the colour and verve of it all.
IT WAS a busy week for Matthew Dunster. He not only directed the Globe’s Much Ado, but also wrote A Tale Of Two Cities which opened (to stinking reviews) at the Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park. It is a very loose adaptation. Dickens’s novel about two nearidentical men in 18th- century London and revolutionary Paris has been wrenched partly into 21st-century London.
The wicked French aristocracy has been cartooned, its cruelties caricatured. One of the supposedly identical men is black, the other white.
The set is a series of metal freight containers. Mr Dunster strives to make hamfisted points about refugees.
Where the Much Ado modernisation succeeds because it stays loyal to Shakespeare’s soul, this show — with its ugly exaggerations and foul language — struck me as a disaster, thoroughly unsuitable for children and for the benevolent Open-Air crowd. It jars with the elegance of the Dickens original.
At the interval I saw 50 people leave — the first few having walked out after 20 minutes. I offer no star rating for this show not because I was hating it (which I was) but because heavy rain started to fall and I had no coat. I left before my suit was completely ruined.