MUCH ADO ABUT NOTHING at the Lyttelton, National Threatre - thin and crispy

Odd that in forty years of theatregoing at the National Theatre I have just seen only my fourth Shakespearean production at the Lyttelton - directors prefer the sweep of the Olivier or the intimate Cottesloe-as-was, Dorfman-as-is; the Lyttelton seems too 'contained' for the Bard.  Simon Russell Beale in HAMLET, Bill Bryden's A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM and Ian McKellen as RICHARD III can now be joined by Simon Godwin's lightweight MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING.

Imagine a Mitchell Leisen-directed MUCH ADO Hollywood screwball comedy starring Frederic March and Carole Lombard as warring lovers Benedick and Beatrice then imagine a National Theatre stage adaptation of it... then imagine it transferring to the West End... then imagine seeing the second replacement cast.  That's the impression I was left with.

The last MUCH ADO I saw was the bizarre Old Vic production woefully directed by Mark Rylance and starring Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones - relive the horror here - so I enjoyed the Babycham fizz of this production - just not enough...  All it did was remind me of the wonderful Branagh / Thompson film and the 2008 delicious pairing of Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker at the Olivier - relive that here.

The setting is now Leonato's sprauncy Hotel Messina on the Riviera in the 1930s; in the rewrite, Leonato has lost a brother but gained a wife Antonia.  He still welcomes Don Pedro's batallion of soldiers which includes young Claudio who loves Leonato's daughter Hero, the militantly single Benedick and Don Pedro's illegitimate brother Don John, who is quietly seeking revenge on Claudio for gaining promotion instead of him.

Staying at the hotel already is Beatrice, Hero's cousin, who suffers no fools and had previously had a relationship with Benedick but now "There is a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit between them."  As the "merry war" resumes, the nasty Don John schemes to undo Claudio's love for Hero.

Something very odd happens midway through MUCH ADO: after Claudio is tricked into thinking Hero has been unfaithful to him and rebuffs her at the altar, a plot is developed to make him think Hero died through his actions and he has to publicly grieve for her before marrying a relative of hers.  Now we know it's a trick, the characters know it's a trick but every production I have seen suddenly switches from comedy to tragedy for this section of the play, with only the interminable "rude mechanicals" sub-plot of Dogberry and his night watchmen discovering the plot.  

Of course it is all eventually laughed off as - indeed - much ado about nothing but the questions always remain: if Claudio has already proved too quick to believe his intended is unfaithful why won't he do so again and if all it took to reunite Beatrice and Benedick was hearsay from others, how solid is their relationship?  Luckily no one has ever dared write a sequel so we will take Mr Shakespeare's word that they did, indeed, live happily ever after.

I just wish Simon Godwin has paused the relentlessly jolly production to have reflected the darker undertows of the capers but the National obviously wants a summer Shakespeare so a summer Shakespeare it shall have with a jazz band and choreographed company dancing to boot.

Anna Fleischele's palatial hotel set is impressive but ultimately all it does is sit there in the way while the costume design is colourful but also distracting: Beatrice's costumes also are very unbecoming on Katherine Parkinson's shortish stature.

John Heffernan is a charming Benedick but again doesn't really remain memorable while Katherine Parkinson again is a serviceable Beatrice but in a very studied ironical way...  it's a rare actress who makes no impression with Beatrice's glorious line "but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born."  As I said above, they felt like a replacement cast.

Of the supporting performers I liked the Antonia of Wendy Kweh whose anger at the supposed shaming of her daughter really woke up that scene, there was an intelligent Hero from Ionna Kimbrook and Rufus Wright's Leonato was impressibly quick to anger in the denunciation scene but that's about it.  Don't get me started on Claudio performing his lines like a footballer being inverviewed after a game or Margaret (the actress is making her first professional appearance after drama school) saying her lines like she was shouting them from the main stage at Glastonbury.

But Shakespeare was the star of the show, as is so often the case, with his 423 year-old words still making one laugh and sigh... and was there ever a better summation of a comedy than the lovely "...for man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion".

xt Signior Benedick and
her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.

This
a kind of merry war betwixt Signior Benedick and
her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.her. They never meet but there’s a skirmish of wit
between them.

JULIIUS CAESAR at the Bridge Theatre - all terribly new, all terribly old

All in all, it was an evening of remembering things..
.

 

...I remembered that Nicholas Hytner's 'modern-dress' Shakespeare productions might make critics salivate but to me they are crushingly obvious attempts at saying "Hey kids... Shakespeare could almost be writing about today!"; surely any decent production should rely on the text to get that over to an audience.

...I remembered how The Bridge Theatre's YOUNG MARX so underwhelmed me and here I was seeing it's second production to similar feelings

 ... and I remembered how uncomfortable the seating is at The Bridge, a willful act of neglect on the part of Hytner and oppo Nick Starr as the theatre was only built last year.

...and finally I remembered how much I loathe being interrupted during the first important minutes of a production by disruptive latecomers and a clueless usher.  Could they have come in during the caterwauling pro-Caesar band playing in the round playing area?  No.  Due to this-in-the-round configuration, the latecomers had to come through our row led by a clueless bumbling usher to get to far-flung seats as the actors were already speaking.

Now The Bridge Theatre's 'dress circle' third row has NO legroom when you are sitting in the large tip-down seats so we all had to stand and attempt to squash against the back wall when this tribe of arseholes made their way loudly and clumsily along the row.  Cue shouting from people whose feet were stood on and those who did the standing... meanwhile I have lost my train of thought and the actors might as well be speaking Urdu for all I fucking cared.  I repeat... this theatre was built last year, so we are not talking about seating as in the more ancient west end theatres which are cramped.  So one can only assume that the architect responsible deliberately made them like this.  The arsehole.

So.. by the time the mayhem died down we had missed the first scene altogether.  Sad to report I was so angry at all of the above that the production had lost me... and nothing I saw particularly made me fight to catch up.

Which is a shame considering I was looking forward to seeing this especially after seeing Dominic Dromgoole's gripping Globe production in 2014 which showed how timely Shakespeare's play is and probably always will be... and no, that wasn't in modern dress.

It's also a shame as there were good performances struggling to get out from Hytner's absurdly LOUD production, nothing terribly revelatory, but good.  Ben Wishaw was well-cast as a liberal elite Brutus, first seen at his desk surrounded by books, who is suckered into joining the conspiracy against Caesar when they appeal to his Republican idealism.  Wishaw is not a terribly likeable performer; there is a prissy petulant quality to his acting which suited the role of Brutus - a man whose idealist nature led to his downfall - but there were also no surprises in his performance: he gave me just what I expected.

Michelle Fairley played Cassius with a needling earnestness but nowhere in her performance did she suggest anything that was revelatory or what was gained by having her cast over a male actor, I also got no real heat off of David Calder's Caesar, for all the hints of Donald Trump - which was too drearily obvious to have been pursued in rehearsal.  Again, it's not that he gave a bad performance... it just didn't reveal or illuminate.

I had sadly the same feeling for David Morrissey whose hang-dog Mark Antony reminded me of the Tex Avery cartoon dog Droopy more than the quick-witted character who subtly beats the conspirators at their own game.  He upped his game for the famous funeral oration but then he almost seemed to disappear into the clanging loud whirlwind of the final third of the production.

One had to look further down the ranks for the performances that did stand out: Wendy Kweh's Portia was suitably impassioned in her attempt to keep Caesar from going to the Senate while Hannah Stokely and Leila Farzad stood out as Metellus Cimber and Decius, senators who all play their parts in lulling Caesar into thinking it's just another day at the office.  The most sparky performance of all was from Adjoa Andoh as the spiteful Casca, whose shade-throwing starts the whole conspiracy off; her pointed and arch performance made one feel sorry for the character's absence in the second half.

As i said all the stalls seats have been removed for JULIUS CAESAR making the punters so-many unpaid extras in the crowd scenes - and just like the Globe's groundlings - we had a fainter!  The production had to be halted in the scene between Cassius and Casca when a young bloke fainted and he had to be removed from the acting area, the wuss - it was only about 30 minutes in.

Although I can see the point in the promenade set-up, ultimately I tired of seeing the audience being moved about like so much cattle and looking about themselves while the actors were performing in front of them.  I did however like Bunny Christie's inspired production design of having platforms rise up in and around the audience to give the actors their stages - the Senate was particularly well-realized.

I'm only sorry I did not enjoy the production more.  To be honest I got more from the excellent programme notes than from the production!