Much ado about laughter in Globe’s sun-kissed Shakespeare
Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare’s Globe, London) Verdict: Shakespearean sunshine ★★★★☆
Spirited Away (Coliseum, London) Verdict: A spectacular struggle ★★★☆☆
The Cherry Orchard (Donmar Warehouse, London) Verdict: Bitter fruit ★★☆☆☆
DThe story is of mutually loathing Beatrice and Benedick, who are tricked by their friends into thinking they’re secretly in love with each other. And it’s presented in its Sicilian setting, with Sean Holmes’s production going for colour not catechism, and filling the venue with rolling laughter.
Some clouds follow Beatrice’s cousin, Hero, who is stood up at the altar. But these are quickly dispelled thanks to poetry that’s memorably rooted in the body — whether it be Beatrice’s talk of stopping mouths with a kiss, or Benedick swearing he will live in her heart, die in her lap and be buried in her eyes (still one of the greatest chat-up lines ever written).
Amalia Vitale’s bite-sized Beatrice has a merry, skipping wit, and seems genuinely perturbed by Benedick’s unexpected affection.
Ekow Quartey, meanwhile, is a full-bodied Benedick, twice the size of Beatrice and adding physical comedy to the prospect of their romantic union.
There’s strong acting throughout, with John Lightbody as Hero’s father Leonato, shown as a doting dad thrown into a panic by his daughter’s defamation.
And as for Hero herself, Lydia Fleming — like her betrothed Claudio (Adam Wadsworth) — is a vulnerable teenager shocked by the world’s vicissitudes.
Jonnie Broadbent, as constable Dogberry, makes light work of the Dad’s Army-style Elizabethan police force. His broad, verbal comedy is matched by the dazzling, orange and blue palette of Grace Smart’s design.
And this is topped by Elizabethan costumes and a carnival of animals for the masked ball that sees a cat (Beatrice) put among the pigeons (Benedick). Loosen a button and bathe in their warmth.
MARE we hope that our damp British summer may yet match the bright warm sunshine of the new production of Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe?
UCH as I marvelled at the technical virtuosity of John Caird’s live staging of Studio Ghibli’s 2001 Japanese animated film
Spirited Away, it’s hard to be enchanted for three full hours if you’re not sure what’s going on.
At first, it’s the simple enough tale of a little girl lost in an alien world after being separated from her parents. Think The Wizard Of Oz, Narnia or Alice In Wonderland.
But the world of the gods where she pitches up is a culturally distant universe, made remoter still by being presented in Japanese (with surtitles drawing the eye from the action on stage).
As our ten-year-old heroine, Chihiro, adult actor Kanna Hashimoto (right) was never less than a delightful ball of energy in the alternating cast I saw this week. She was as bewildered as I was by the antics of the gods in a celestial bathhouse where the receptionist is a daddy long legs, and the boss is a ferocious, Mrs Thatcher figure who also looks like Ayatollah Khomeini when assuming her avian, air-borne puppet form.
For pure spectacle Spirited Away (below right) is quite something — thanks to a rotating timber-framed traditional Japanese house buried in a green glade. And all sorts of puppets catch the eye — from flying dragons to furry sootballs, as well as a stinky ‘sludge god’. And even if it could use a few songs, Joe Hisaishi’s live orchestral score is a glorious, surging river of sound.
■ THERESA MAY’S ‘citizens of nowhere’ have descended on Covent Garden like the undead for a deracinated assault on Anton Chekhov’s The
Cherry Orchard — contrived by Aussie avant garde director Benedict Andrews.
Top among his cast of global thesps is German actress Nina Hoss — best known for playing the lover of Cate Blanchett’s title character in the film Tar.
Chekhov’s masterpiece was a cry of pain from the last days of Tsarism on a once fine, now insolvent country estate. But here it’s made to feel like a drama college workshop, as the cast brainstorm ideas, and drift about an open-plan stage that looks like the carpet department at John Lewis.
With all the actors sitting in the audience, Hoss takes the lead as bereaved landowner Ranevskaya, wearing Parisian haute couture. And although she lays on the tears in recollection of a lost child, rejected love and her darling orchard, the production lacks a sense of time or place — leaving her and everyone else unmoored.
The only drive comes from Adeel Akhtar as the spry, pocket-sized nouveau riche peasant who wants to buy the estate and level it for holiday lets. While this is meant to make the play feel more modern, some of it remains dated. How, for example, are we supposed to credit Daniel Monks’s guffspouting teacher who claims to be ‘above love’? Such idealists are of their time. Today, I fear, he would be a bitter ‘incel’ (involuntary celibate) trolling women online.
Much Ado About Nothing (shakespearesglobe.com) and Spirited Away (spiritedawayuk.com) run until August 24. The Cherry Orchard finishes on June 22 (donmarwarehouse.com).