Shakespeare meets ‘Broadcast News’ in a very DC staging of ‘Much Ado’
WASHINGTON: Double acts are nothing new to the stage. But how about the wild, transatlantic one-two punch that Simon Godwin, artistic director of DC’s Shakespeare Theatre Company, is attempting to deliver?
In August, Godwin was at London’s National Theatre, where he unveiled a production of Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ with a British cast. He set it in the 1930s, at a hotel on the Italian Riviera.
Two months later, Godwin was in Washington, working on the same play, this time with an American cast. Only now, ‘Much Ado’ takes place in a contemporary television newsroom in the nation’s capital — where it has its official opening at Sidney Harman Hall on Nov 15.
It takes a moment for this rare and improbable turn of events to sink in: one director for two distinct ‘Much Ados,’ one after the other.
Shifting geography and epoch has become the norm for Shakespearean productions. Still, facing the limits of time and career opportunity, directors can find it hard to whip up even one inspired version of a canonical play. But to try to create two?
No one is more cognizant of this unusual happenstance than Godwin, who with ‘Much Ado’ gets his first chance to originate a Shakespeare production in Washington since his arrival in 2020. (He directed a ‘Timon of Athens’ that year, but it ran at Brooklyn’s Theater for a New Audience before moving to STC’s Klein Theatre.) The pandemic shutdown upended Godwin’s original plan — to produce the DC-newsroom-based ‘Much Ado’ in the Harman in spring 2020.
In fact, the Washington ‘Much Ado’ was on Godwin’s drawing board long before the National Theatre also asked him to direct the play.
“I mean, it’s such a funny, topsy-turvy journey, because I’d been working on the Washington version for so long,” Godwin said. “So then, before doing that, to come up with a second production in a very different way? And to do that one first? It was a kind of, yeah, unusual.”
The challenge offered a director a remarkable experiment in the malleability of Shakespeare’s art — and an exploration of his own imaginative skills. The assignment required him to lead each cast through rehearsals with a commitment to a distinct vision of the play. And it would call on Godwin to respond as freshly and inventively to actors in Washington as in London.
“I said to him the other day,” recalled Kate Jennings Grant, who plays Beatrice in DC, “‘Simon, I just have to say that, and I mean it as a compliment, I would never know that you directed this play before.’ And then we both burst out laughing.”
‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is of course about something — the bittersweet battle of wits between two prideful, headstrong combatants, Beatrice and Benedick, who are desperately in love and are the only ones who don’t know it. It’s a piquant romantic comedy that takes a disturbing turn: a subplot unfolding around another couple, Hero and her fiance, Claudio, in which an accusation of sexual betrayal is maliciously drummed up.
The British-born Godwin could have saved himself time and energy by producing the same version twice. Instead, the less possessive attitude about Shakespeare he’s encountered on these shores bolstered his instinct to try something different.
“Like all of those comedies, it comes freighted with such an expectation of history,” he said, of ‘Much Ado’ ‘But one thing I found in Washington very strongly is this release from history. The fact that people in Washington, they haven’t seen it three times in the last 12 months.’ (His London ‘Much Ado,’ which ended a month-long engagement in September, was running there at the same time as another ‘Much Ado,’ at Shakespeare’s Globe.)
“I’ve really experienced what I’d hope to find in America,” Godwin added, “which is an open space to re-meet plays afresh.”
In a recent rehearsal at Shakespeare Theatre’s offices on Capitol Hill, the actors in his American “Much Ado” were putting the play on its feet for the first time. In this 21st-century version, Beatrice and Benedick (played by Rick Holmes) are co-anchors on SNN — the Shakespeare News Network, of course.
Hero (Nicole King) is the sportscaster and Claudio (Paul Deo Jr.) is the weatherman, and they have their own flirty studio thing going on. Emily Burns, the show’s dramaturge, has written Bard-centric news items for the SNN team to read, such as this ‘Macbeth’ riff: “Climate change activists have responded with protests and blockades after Birnam Wood had been completely uprooted overnight.”
If Godwin’s stylish London version had the continental look and feel of a movie like ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel,’ the Washington production seemed to be headed in the direction of ‘Broadcast News.’
“He’s got an incredibly infectious, energetic temperament, which is wonderful to have on a play like ‘Much Ado,’ “said John Heffernan, who played Benedick in the National Theatre production. “It’s quite frightening at times because he’s very bold in his decision-making. To say, ‘Right, we’re going to sit in a ‘Grand Budapest’-style hotel. We’re going to a newsroom.’ You know, he commits and he’s fearless.”
For the actors in the Washington ‘Much Ado’ — some of whom were cast more than two years ago — there was a possibility that Godwin would no longer have the head space for novel approaches to the play.
“I don’t feel from him this sense of ‘Let me just tell you what works here,’ “Holmes said in a joint interview with the SNN news team: Grant, King and Deo. “I think he’s studiously trying to avoid that. Nevertheless, there are little nuggets from him that have you thinking, ‘Well, he probably knows what he’s talking about.’
“Godwin envisioned the newscast as “a context that creates chemistry.”
And chemistry is the essence of ‘Much Ado.’ In the London production, Heffernan and Katherine Parkinson, as Beatrice, could not avoid each other amid the posh exclusivity of a Jazz Age European resort; a tense Washington newsroom might raise the comic temperature even higher.
“The idea of the deadline of a broadcast, something the characters have to do, felt very appealing,” the director said. “I think there’s a link between the momentous and the erotic, that if you’ve got these two people doing something on a deadline, rather than just being onstage with somebody, it creates a chemistry which can then bloom into something else.” — The Washington Post