Much Ado About Nothing

by William Shakespeare

  Terry Hands’ 1982 production for the RSC marked a revival of the play’s lush romanticism, in contrast to Gerald Freedman’s 1988 New York Shakespeare Festival production, described as:

  A high-spirited romp from beginning to end, this “Much Ado” opens with a mock sword fight; ferociously engaged with his soldierly colleague Claudio, Mr [Kevin] Kline’s Benedick immediately displays the dazzling physical virtuosity that has so often characterized his performances…his Benedick may be brilliant, but he is also vain and hilariously foolish. As he whirls about the stage, Blythe Danner’s Beatrice pointedly refuses to look up from her book—but even before she and Benedick commence their verbal volleys, the potential heat of their ultimate destiny is obvious.32

  In the same year, Judi Dench directed a warmly received production for Kenneth Branagh’s newly formed Renaissance Theatre Company, with Branagh himself as Benedick and Samantha Bond as Beatrice. The simplicity of its staging and conception was in marked contrast to Di Trevis’ production at the RSC. Since then Much Ado has continued its merry war in countless theaters all over the world, including Richard Monette’s modern, cosmopolitan 1998 Stratford Ontario production. Peter Meineck directed Robert Richmond’s version of the play for New York’s Aquila Theater in 2001, turning it “into a spoof of 1960s–70s TV and film secret agents.”33 Greg Doran’s brilliant Sicilian RSC production was staged in 2002, the same year as Mark Lamos’ Hartford Stage/Shakespeare Theater production set “mostly in the garden of an English country house in the 1920s.”34 Daniela Varon’s 2003 production at the Founders’ Theater in Lenox, Massachusetts, again set the play in a Messina “inspired by popular images of Sicily in the 1950s,…steeped in the culture of violence and family loyalty associated with the Mafia.”35

  A play that has enjoyed such continuous popularity in the theater would seem an obvious candidate for screen treatment. The earliest was Phillips Smalley’s 1913 American silent version. There was an East German version in 1963 and two Russian films in 1956 and 1973. A number of successful stage productions were filmed, including Zeffirelli’s 1965 National Theatre production with Maggie Smith and Robert Stephens, as well as Joseph Papp’s 1973 New York Shakespeare Festival production. Musical adaptations include Hector Berlioz’s acclaimed Béatrice et Bénédict (1862) and the 2006 American musical adaptation The Boys Are Coming Home, set in the Second World War. The most successful film adaptation, though, is undoubtedly Kenneth Branagh’s 1993 film set, as Branagh describes in his introduction to the screenplay, in an “imaginary world [which] could have existed almost anytime between 1700 and 1900”:

  It was distant enough to allow the language to work without the clash of period anachronisms and for a certain fairy tale quality to emerge. This fairy tale idea seemed to spring naturally out of the countryside in which we were working. We were in Tuscany, central Italy, a magical landscape of vines and olives that seemed untouched by modern life. Lusher and more verdant than Sicily (Shakespeare’s setting), it allowed us to create a visual idyll in which this cautionary tale might be told.36

  AT THE RSC

  Much Ado About Nothing is among the most performed of Shakespeare’s plays and regarded as a “banker” by theater managers. Critical, as well as popular, focus is invariably on the performances of the actors playing Beatrice and Benedick, on the nature of their relationship and the quality of their repartee. Much Ado was chosen as the opening production at the freshly named Royal Shakespeare Theatre (RST) under the new management of Peter Hall as artistic director, and Trevor Nunn made it his first production when he took over as artistic director in 1968. The RSC has mounted twelve productions since 1961: two touring productions, nine at the RST and one at the Swan Theatre—Marianne Elliott’s production for the 2006/07 Complete Works season was widely regarded as one of the season’s jewels, as well as being a strong box-office success.

  When and Where Messina?

  Much Ado has the highest prose content of all the plays except The Merry Wives of Windsor and it is, perhaps, the immediacy, freshness, and informality of the dialogue that has led directors, for the most part, to move the play away from its Elizabethan origins to later periods. RSC productions have been set in the Regency and Victorian periods, during the British Raj in India, in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Sets have rarely made much of the specifically Sicilian location of Messina, though Stephen Brimson Lewis designed a sun-baked piazza for Gregory Doran’s 2002 production at the RST.

  Regency and Victorian Settings

  Michael Langham’s 1961 production, designed by Desmond Heeley, was played against a backdrop of a towering Italian house of honeydew-colored stone and set in the early nineteenth century, with the women dressed in graceful, high-waisted, neoclassical dresses and the men dashing in immaculately tailored Napoleonic War uniforms. Although the production touched only lightly on the play’s darker elements, they were suggested in the autumnal leaves on the creeper climbing the house front and in the rainstorm that had the guests at Hero and Claudio’s wedding arriving with dripping umbrellas. Perhaps unsurprisingly at the start of a decade that was to see such radical social changes in Britain, W. A. Darlington in the Daily Telegraph was conscious that Leonato and his family had been made well-to-do middle class, in contrast to the young noblemen who were their houseguests.37

  In 1971, Ronald Eyre directed a production unequivocally set in Victorian England. The action in Leonato’s house took place in an elegant conservatory with a view of immaculate green lawns beyond and costumes described by several critics as “Ruritanian comic opera.” The effect, as critic Michael Billington described it, was of a “Betjemanesque” world, where “everything conspires to suggest a leisurely, sunlit, aristocratic society.” Lighting “miraculously transformed” the conservatory into entrance hall, courtyard, and church.38

  John Barton’s 1976 setting of the play in late nineteenth-century British India was generally regarded as a triumph: “an ideal background for the play about the prankish practical jokes of a bored officer class and about the liberation of long-suppressed emotion.”39 A garrison town was suggested by a double tier of timber balconies, draped with beaded or cheesecloth curtains and sunblinds. Cricket could be heard being played offstage.

  Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Settings

  For Trevor Nunn’s 1968 production, Christopher Morley designed Elizabethan costumes with a twentieth-century twist: many of the fabrics suggested military camouflage in their color and pattern. The militarism of the men was emphasized, and their dance at the party at Leonato’s house was an aggressive sword-dance performed in threatening visors. There was a somber and sinister air to the production, with an emphasis on the spying and eavesdropping that pervade the play. The acting area was enclosed by a severe rectangular box of translucent gauze that could be lit in a variety of ways to suggest interior and exterior locations but was always slightly sinister: “Comedy and the sinister were continually in tension.”40 Nunn is quoted as saying: “I have yet to see the play done with sufficient seriousness; ‘Kill Claudio’ is for real.”41

  3. Helen Mirren as Hero, Janet Suzman as Beatrice, and Rowena Cooper as Ursula in Trevor Nunn’s 1968 Stratford production, with its emphasis on the spying and eavesdropping that pervade the play.

  For Terry Hands’ 1982 production, designer Ralph Koltai also enclosed the stage in a box, but this time it had a mirrored floor and walls constructed of perspex screens imprinted with stylized trees. The effect was not sinister but “achingly beautiful,”42 magical and romantic. The mirrored setting suggested a self-regarding, self- loving, narcissistic society, and the Cavalier-style costumes gave the production an elegant courtliness while implying that this world was about to come to an end—Michael Billington in the Guardian felt that Hands had missed a trick: “Surely if Don Pedro and his chums are Cavaliers, Don John should be a Roundhead?”43 The overall effect, however, was not elegiac but romantic—joy just tinged with melancholy. This was a highly successful production, acclaimed by critics and
enjoyed by audiences. It had a long afterlife following its season at the RST: it went to Newcastle and The Barbican in 1983 and spent 1984 touring, culminating in performances in New York and Washington.

  Of Bill Alexander’s 1990 production it was suggested:

  Two years ago, the RSC bombed badly with a vogue-ish Much Ado About Nothing set in some 50’s no-man’s-land. They now make amends with a visually seductive, socially consistent Bill Alexander production that aroused the audience to ecstasy.44

  The production’s designer, Kit Surrey, returned to the seventeenth century with an elegantly hedged English garden which “neatly suggests a hierarchical world in which everyone knows his or her place.”45 Lighting cast a golden glow: “it bathed the cast’s faces in wonderful amalgams of amber, bronze, flame, white and creamy pink. It gave the evening its enchanted atmosphere—and its meaning.”46

  In 1996, Michael Boyd’s production was staged in another enclosed courtyard, but its eclectic nature failed to please: “The costumes are Elizabethan enough but Tom Piper’s set is decidedly odd, a mixture of 18th-century drawing-room, Guildford Cathedral and de Chirico piazza that comes complete with a tree splintering up through varnished floorboards.”47 Like the 1982 production, the set also featured mirrors and portraits, but here they were disturbing; the whole production was dark in tone, focusing on the Hero– Claudio–Don John plot as the core of the play. Even the final dance “was accompanied by music to slit your wrists to.”48 Many of the critics disliked the air of gloom, although Nicholas de Jongh found it exhilarating: “It makes it feel as if an early Shakespeare comedy is being transformed into one of his dark problem plays or late romances.”49 He alone commented on the ending of the play: the roof of the courtyard rose to reveal blue sky, and the audience saw the mirrored reflection of a small boy standing beside a sapling tree—signs that the future was assured. It was, he suggested, “Much Ado turned vividly inside out.”50

  1930s, 1940s, and 1950s Settings

  In 1988 Di Trevis turned a materialist-feminist light on the play. Messina was a Mediterranean playground for the rich and idle; the set (designed by Mark Thompson) a pillared white-marble patio complete with swimming pools. The costumes were 1950s couture, but the decade glanced at was the materialistic 1980s. At the opening of the play, the lazy luxury of Messina was disrupted by the sound of a helicopter overhead from which a wounded soldier was winched down before the other men appeared. The gender attitudes of a patriarchal society were made very clear, and the “happy ending” of the double wedding was subverted by dressing Beatrice and Hero in black with black confetti fluttering down on them. Critics and audiences, for the most part, found this a problematic interpretation; Robert Smallwood commented: “It is difficult to go on disliking the whole of Messina’s high society as much as the production seems to want us to.”51

  For Gregory Doran’s 2002 production, Stephen Brimson Lewis designed a set that let the audience know instantly that it was in Sicily—“a sun-baked Sicilian piazza, which glows like a ripe tomato,”52 with a great wall on wooden shutters and wrought-iron balconies. For some critics the opening moments were too crowd-pleasing: “an appallingly saccharine start—wheeling in a brass band, a cute schoolboy and the predictable jolly local on a bike,”53 but the men returning from the war were black-shirted—Mussolini’s troops, back from the Ethiopian campaign—and the scene was set firmly in 1930s fascist Sicily. Though the sun shone and the comedy flourished, the dark underbelly of the play was never hidden for long.

  For Marianne Elliott’s 2006 production, Lez Brotherston transformed the Swan Theatre into Havana. Multicolored lights were strung across the auditorium and the audience entered a Cuban nightclub alive with salsa music and cigar smoke. Smiles broke out in expectation of fun. This was early 1950s, pre-Castro Cuba; “You half expect Sky Masterson and Sarah Brown, on their whirlwind trip to Havana, to wander in from Guys and Dolls.”54 Elliott had chosen a Latin country for the play’s hot blood and macho honor code and an era just before the changes in Western sexual mores of the 1960s which would make the Hero–Claudio plot implausible. In addition, as Michael Billington suggested, “What it offers is a plausible military context, a raffish glamour and endless opportunities, gloriously seized by Olly Fox’s score, for rumbas, sambas and congas.”55 On the darker side, “The reflex sexism of this Catholic society suits the sobering aspects of a play in which an innocent girl is slandered at the altar by credulous barrack-room misogynists.”56 The change in mood in the play’s second half was strongly signaled: the audience returned from the interval to find the strings of lights turned off.

  Beatrice and Benedick

  These roles dominate performances, and productions are remembered more for the actors who played them than for their directors or design features or for the playing of any of the other roles. Since the second half of the twentieth century was a period during which gender issues were of unprecedented interest, a variety of constructions of the gender politics of this play have been reflected in the playing of these central roles, and the role of Beatrice in particular.

  1961—A New Kind of Beatrice

  The actors in the 1961 production must have felt a huge weight of expectation on their shoulders: not only were they starring in the RST’s opening production, but critics and audiences brought with them the golden memory of a very popular 1955 production starring Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud. This romantic, lyrical staging, in which Beatrice and Benedick were clearly in love from the outset, had been hugely popular—and Peggy Ashcroft was in the audience for the 1961 opening night. Geraldine McEwan and Christopher Plummer, as Beatrice and Benedick, could hardly have been more different from these earlier models. McEwan’s Beatrice bore resemblances to Jane Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet: she was “crackling” and “fiery.” Oddly, she was criticized for a lack of poetry when the only verse Beatrice speaks is her “What fire is in mine ears?” soliloquy, but perhaps it was an absence of lyricism that troubled the critics. The Times’ reviewer commented that “she dispenses with the airs and graces of the traditional Beatrice”; she was “hoydenish” and “a modern young woman who thoroughly enjoys the Elizabethan notion of repartee.”57 These are significant comments: the “airs and graces” had only accrued to actresses playing Beatrice from the Victorian period onward. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century audiences, to judge from the critics’ comments, had enjoyed a forceful, fiery, combative performance from their Beatrices: “every word stabbed,” the critics observed approvingly, and praised the actresses’ “spirit” and “vigor.” In the nineteenth century, however, we find actresses in the role beings extolled as “feminine,” “womanly,” “refined,” and “well-bred” and their raillery had become “pleasant archness.”58 Actresses were being required to tone down Beatrice’s combativeness, and went on doing so, it seems, through to the 1950s. Again, 1961 was a significant date.

  Christopher Plummer, a Canadian actor making his English debut, was an energetic, virile Benedick, in the young Olivier mold, according to Bernard Levin in the Daily Express. Where Gielgud had played a sophisticated, poised, rather intellectual Benedick, Plummer gave a far more physical, soldierly performance, which some critics found charmless.

  1971, 1976, 1988, 2002—Middle-Aged Lovers

  In the sunlit Victorian 1971 production Elizabeth Spriggs and Derek Godfrey played Beatrice and Benedick approaching middle age. Elizabeth Spriggs had made a career in comic supporting roles and was a surprising choice for Beatrice. She created a cheerful, bustling forty-something spinster, constantly busy early on with small household tasks but growing visibly younger from the moment when she believed herself to be loved; he was a hearty public school type, still indulging in schoolboy behavior (at one point, Benedick’s pants were thrown around by his friends). Their early verbal battles were good-natured but sad, freighted with disappointing experience; in place of the brittle exchange of barbs, they fell into comforting, familiar routines. Audiences found them very appealing.

&
nbsp; In John Barton’s 1976 production, set in late nineteenth- century India under the British Raj, Judi Dench and Donald Sinden played a couple on the brink of a lonely middle age, both slight outsiders in their social milieu. One critic wrote: “They make no attempt to be archly charming nor to hold tennis rallies…They swap their insults with a sort of desiccated desperation.”59 Dench, in an unbecoming wig, was “an intelligent spinster who knows she is edging toward the status of maiden aunt,”60 while beneath Sinden’s plummy mannerisms was a man who knew he was heading for the role of eccentric uncle. In Sinden’s performance, “swagger and buffoonery are a camouflage for easily wounded private feelings”;61 he had moments of acute shyness. As her key to playing Beatrice, Dench took the revelation that Benedick had once won Beatrice’s heart “with false dice.” She played a sad, spinsterish woman who had once believed that Benedick loved her but felt she had been deceived; when she “overheard” Hero talking of Benedick’s love for her, she literally skipped for joy.

  In 1988 in Di Trevis’ opulent, cold, materialistic 1950s Messina, Maggie Steed and Clive Merrison played another ageing couple. Steed was “a brassily-painted maypole,”62 “an acid-tongued spinster”63 who

  is on the point of settling into the role of eccentric maiden aunt. Everything about her, from her swooping movement and exaggerated handling of long, swishing costumes, to her advance on the mocking girls with a bared hatpin and her trick of winding up each anti-marital fusillade with a dazzling mirthless grin, comes over as a mocking parody of the feminine arts.64

  Steed has said that she saw Beatrice as the poor relation in the household (where Hero is the heiress), who “sings for her supper” by playing the joker.65 Merrison, too, was a joker, balding and knobbly-kneed in his Bermuda shorts, once he had taken off his military uniform, physically dominated by the taller Steed.