Much Ado about Nothing
Playwright: William Shakespeare Director: Matthew Dunster Shakespeare’s Globe, 21 New Globe Walk, London SE1 (020-7401 9919) Until 15 October Running time: 3hrs (including interval)
The recent output of director Matthew Dunster has been a “head-scratching mixture of the good, the bad and the ugly”, said Dominic Cavendish in The Daily Telegraph. His New York-bound staging of Martin Mcdonagh’s Hangmen was “flawless”, but his appalling “mash-up” of A Tale of Two Cities is currently “driving them out in droves” from Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. And I still “suffer flashbacks to his grim (and grime-music stuffed) ‘gangster’ treatment” of Cymbeline at the Globe last year. So it’s a relief and a pleasure to report that Dunster’s staging of Much Ado, set in the Mexican Revolution of the 1910s, is a “colourful, warmspirited and abundantly comic” triumph.
In place of ruff collars and a focus on textual clarity, this merry “romp” offers ponchos, sombreros, machine-gun belts, a set dominated by a massive and brightly coloured goods train, loud sound effects and multiple tweaks to the text, said Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail. “I’m no trendy neophile”, but I loved the whole thing. It stays true to Shakespeare’s “generous vision of a world where love conquers cynicism”; audiences will revel in its joyous “colour and verve”. The sparring lovers give “adorable” performances, said Dominic Maxwell in The Times. Beatriz Romilly “oozes dubiousness” as Beatrice, the woman who “speaks in knives” but is itching for someone to match her wits. And as Benedick, Matthew Needham “has that rare ability to make his verse feel like real thinking out loud, while he handles the physical gags as nimbly as he masters his later slide into maturity”.
Needham is great, agreed Ian Shuttleworth in the FT. But Romilly is so “strident”, it’s as if “Kate the shrew has wandered into the wrong play”, making Benedick’s love for her utterly implausible. Another issue is the “seemingly mandatory handful of Globe sex changes” – in this case, the elderly Antonio, and chief villain Don John. Gender switches are all very well, but not when they “start making a nonsense of assorted lines, character traits and bits of business”.