The Globe revisits the ‘good old days’ with a splendid production
Much Ado About Nothing Globe, London SE1 ★★★★☆
Verdant, visually appealing and very funny, does Lucy Bailey’s production of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing mark a return to the good old days for the Globe?
The production opens the summer season, finally back at full capacity. More than that, defined by its attention to detail, it balances directorial innovation with actorly inspiration, avoiding the ideological rampancy of some recent shows here.
I may be speaking too soon – we’re poised to see a Julius Caesar “brought home” with “startlingly new relevance”. But, aside from the ushers, who monitor groundling behaviour with the zealousness of APR wardens, the emphasis is on throwing off our cares after a difficult period.
This comedy is often “relocated” to create a sense of surprise and social flux, and Bailey duly sets the action in northern Italy, circa April 1945, days before the country’s liberation. There’s not much ado about all that. But it does mean the returning soldiers at the start of Act One are dirty-faced anti-fascist partisans, wearily emerging through the audience – with the odd bandaged head, slung rifles, even a motorcycle.
They’re met by a household on tenterhooks, presided over by Katy Stephens’s “Leonata” (not the usual, male governor of Messina, Leonato). The returnees lustily sing a round of the folk song that became a resistance anthem, Bella Ciao. Delightful accordion-music fills the air.
Shakespeare’s tragicomic observation – all the same – is that after war, peace doesn’t flow so easily. The battle of the sexes continues apace: Lucy Phelps excels as a put-downarmed Beatrice, the avowed singleton who gives no quarter to resolute bachelor Benedick, a sweetly debonair Ralph Davis, unbuttoning his shirt but intent on avoiding marriage.
Conflict, of course, rages. Phelps’s smiling brittleness indicates that the pair have history, and much of the comedy lies in the way these abstainers get ambushed by suppressed emotion. The famous eavesdropping scenes – in which the duo are gulled into thinking they’ve overheard revelations that the other is smitten with them – are given top-notch treatment. Davis scales an ivy-clad wall, scuttles behind a barrow and even deposits a small tree on his head to hear all; Phelps attains matching humiliation tangled in netting and water-sprinkled.
The counterpoint to those frolicsome indications of how suggestible we are is the impulsive marriage of Patrick Osborne’s Claudio to Nadi Kemp-sayfi’s Hero. The wedding-day disavowal, based on lies about her forsaken virtue, has a memorably vicious edge to it here.
Some of the “business” drags – though the organised chaos of the incompetent night watchmen in the second half is a joy. They’re headed by George Fouracres as the bumptious Dogberry, who even commands bystanders to help get him off the stage, a rigmarole that in its warm, tactile reconnection with the audience affirms that the Globe is taking exactly the right steps to woo us all afresh.
Until Oct 23. Tickets: 020 7401 9919; shakespearesglobe.com