Much Ado About Nothing

Cambridge Arts Theatre, 1st – 5th February, 7.45pm, £15-25

Directed by Carl Heap

[rating: 5/5]

Hearing director Carl Heap’s intentions for this show is illuminating. His aim is to ‘reveal what’s there’ in the text: this means opening Shakespeare out for an audience, and rejecting a superimposed ‘topicality’, which he suggests there is no need for.

Ushering his vision of the energetic Messina on-stage in this faithful rendition of one the best-known comedies, Carl is a dutiful steward to the bard, but this simple underplaying of the task of interpretation disguises the huge amount of choice involved in the transition from script to stage. A performance necessarily foregrounds aspects of the text, and Carl’s decision seems to have been to align this with the natural hierarchy of importance in the narrative. This was the production’s distinguishing success.

Photographs by Natasha Brice

The company managed to generate an instantly welcoming and encompassing feel for the show. Oddly, in a production marked by comparative professionalism (higher price, big theatre, schoolkids forced to come), much of its charm came from sustained engagement with the audience so that it felt like a communal effort at merriment. Of course the script helped, but it was brilliantly enhanced by a cast that weren’t afraid to talk to the audience. Playful colloquial additions to the text and a set that bled into the auditorium joined in the conspiracy to bring us along to the party.

A lot of work went into creating a strong atmosphere. At times  this was a tad strained- despite Simon Haines’ insistence we didn’t really feel like citizens of Messina awaiting Don Pedro’s arrival in the first scene- but elsewhere it excelled; the performance of the three actors during the gulling of Benedick was so delightfully executed that we did become accomplices to their game. But we were in safe hands from the start: Joe Bannister was a natural authority on-stage with his practically flawless performance as Don Pedro, and the conviviality of the Sicilian environment was effectively generated and neatly contrasted with the stillness of Don John’s sobering entrances.

But all of this is to be expected. The real accomplishment of the production, what makes it worth going to see, is the maintenance of the centrality of the relationship between Benedick and Beatrice. At the heart of the play is the reminder of the ability of kindness and love to dissolve obstinacy and defensiveness, and this aspect is often underplayed in favour of the easier comedy of the characters’ dual pomposities and undignified U-turn. Not so here. The partnership between Nick Ricketts and Giulia Galastro somehow acquired a sacredness that had value alongside the comedy of their setup. By the second half Benedick was visibly in possession of something a little higher than the merriment of his fellow gentlemen. Something understated, sudden, almost assumed – his performance grew steadily more nuanced, and the humour of Claudio and Don Pedro became a tool to demonstrate his new-found sensitivity. As much as we loved the comedy, when he turns back to them in fulfillment of his simple promise to Beatrice and says “I will leave you to your gossip-like humour”, we go with him, and the wonderfully gauche Claudio is left with Don Pedro looking as if they’re both missing something.

If this isn’t ‘revealing what’s there’ I don’t know what is. Equally, Mairin O’Hagan’s unconventionally gutsy Hero made sense of the celebration of the reunion with the embarrassed Claudio with an empowered nod that said her second-wave acquiescence was forgiveness rather than gratitude, an imaginative interpretation.

After the play, I lingered around the school group (erm…) to see if I could glean whether the Shakespeare had been opened up to them as well as it had me by production. “Don John was really good-looking,” seemed to be the consensus. Yup, further appreciation of the transition from script to stage. Success.