In Gregory Doran’s acclaimed 2002 production, set in Mussolini’s Sicily, Harriet Walter and Nicholas le Prévost played a couple well into middle age. Le Prévost was “a shabby roué,” “a lank-haired, unshaven old louche, for whom even the plink and fizz of a soluble aspirin proves too vexatious the morning after the night before.”66 Walter, on the other hand, was an intensely glamorous older woman, “dazzlingly attractive in her Thirties outfits,” with “the thoroughbred wit and presence of a Katharine Hepburn.”67 The critics were unanimous in praise of her performance:
Walter exudes the kind of sophisticated Thirties sassiness one associates with comedies featuring cocktails and Cole Porter. Her Beatrice can switch winningly between headgirl surliness and heartfelt hurt, and even hints at a deeply pained past with her old sparring partner Benedick.68
In the first scene, elegantly trousered, she jumped onto the dispatch rider’s motorbike and “thereafter remained the play’s moral engine.”69
She and Gregory Doran solved the problem that very “sassy,” controlled Beatrices have of her sudden melt into girly helplessness at the end of the eavesdropping scene: “And, Benedick, love on, I will requite thee, / Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand” (3.1.113–14). Hero deliberately doused her with water while watering the hedge behind which she was hiding so that she emerged unglamorously dripping and disheveled, her physical disarray mirroring her emotional confusion. (This piece of business also provided a reason for the cold she is suffering from on the morning of Hero’s wedding—an idea used in the 1988 production where Maggie Steed hid in the swimming pool during the eavesdropping scene.) Walter and le Prévost were a couple who grew into an extraordinary and touching emotional closeness in the dark second half of the play.
1968, 1982—The Rebels
When Trevor Nunn directed the play in 1968 he was only twenty-eight, though he had just taken over as artistic director at the RSC. He directed Janet Suzman and Alan Howard as a very young, almost adolescent Beatrice and Benedick, boisterous, frivolous, and cynical, in rebellion against the matchmaking society around them, denying their evident attraction to each other. In spite of the Elizabethan costume, there was a suggestion of 1960s disaffection in their attitudes. Suzman was a zany Beatrice, her hair and clothes often in disarray; B. A. Young, in the Financial Times, thought she seemed “not altogether to have got over her Katherine in last year’s Shrew.”70
4. Derek Jacobi as Benedick and Sinead Cusack as Beatrice in Terry Hands’ 1982 RSC production. Cusack played her as “A Beatrice who is very angry. A woman who has been damaged by society.”
Sinead Cusack’s Beatrice in 1982 also evoked comparisons with Katherine; one critic stated: “when she says ‘I would eat his heart in the market place’ you’d better believe it,” before going on to suggest she was a “self-taming shrew,” who comes to emotional equilibrium through love.71 Cusack herself has said that she had some conflict with her director, Terry Hands, over her interpretation. Young, blond, and beautiful, she had been cast for her femininity: “That’s what he cast. That’s what he used in his direction of me. But…I showed him other areas of her character. A Beatrice who is very angry. A woman who has been damaged by society.”72 Her Benedick, Derek Jacobi, played a “skittish, larky, life-and-soul-of-the-party bachelor”73 with some camp mannerisms, who sobered up and grew up under the influence of love. The play ended on an unashamedly romantic note, with the pair left alone, dancing together and talking—the beginning of a lifelong conversation—as a red sun set behind them.
1996—Lovers in Dark Times
The dark tone of Michael Boyd’s 1996 production was a challenge to Siobhan Redmond and Alex Jennings in their early exchanges: audiences expect fun from Beatrice and Benedick, and this production was not about fun. Alex Jennings played the part with “sardonic and urbane wit,” “elegant nobility,” and, later, “sober gravity”;74 his performance was widely regarded as the play’s “one unqualified success…[he] seems to be taking part in a different play from everyone else—the real play. He is unashamedly charming, a smoothie who is also engagingly ridiculous.”75 Siobhan Redmond played a “restless babbling Beatrice, lightweight but intense”;76 she burst into wretched tears on hearing that Benedick loved her.
1990, 2006—Sexual Attraction
Before the opening of Bill Alexander’s 1990 production, Susan Fleetwood, who was to play Beatrice, was interviewed with her Benedick, Roger Allam. Of Beatrice she said:
She is delicious—a wonderful, eruptive person, an oddball, like Benedick. The two don’t fit into their society. Beatrice is quick, sharp, vulnerable, then there are moments when she is pure joy, when she wants to just fly for the hell of it…I’ve never worked with Roger before but we’ll buzz one another up and be a treat…You’ve got to play…for sex—opposite Roger you couldn’t do anything else.77
Behind her cutting one-liners, Fleetwood always suggested her intense feelings for Allam’s relaxed, charming, intelligent Benedick.
Tamsin Greig came as the star name to the 2006 1950s Cuba production in The Swan. Well known as a comedienne in her television work, she found much more in the role than the comedy. A striking figure in black and white, in contrast to the sweet-pea frocks of Hero and the other young women, she dominated the stage early on. Critics reached out for comparisons to convey her style: “Greig brings to Beatrice the caustic wit and pencil-skirted style of a wise-cracking Hollywood dame like Eve Arden”;78 “Tamsin Greig makes a handsome Beatrice, who with her slit skirt, pointy shoes, cigarette holder and hands on hips has something of the tart grandeur of a down-market Princess Margaret.”79 What she also suggested was the barely controlled frustration of a woman who was faster and brighter than anyone else around. The scene of her eavesdropping was quite as funny as Benedick’s, where it is often less so, but faced with the news that Benedick loved her, she was filled with an aching vulnerability. Joseph Millson as Benedick was not overshadowed, though: “Joseph Millson’s performance…strikes me as definitive. Handsome in voice and in person, he can carry the audience on his roar and draw it into his hush. The elements of wit, anger and vulnerability are thrillingly mixed in this actor.”80 Together they made a funny, intelligent, passionate pairing.
“Kill Claudio”
The delivery of this notoriously difficult line is often singled out for comment by the critics. In 1968, Janet Suzman yelled the line with tigerish intensity and Alan Howard yelled back “Not for the wide world!” One critic felt that they “solved the problem” of the line.81 Many thought that Judi Dench, in 1976, delivered it beautifully (with a smothered giggle) but others complained that the line raised a laugh. Michael Billington wrote of Susan Fleetwood in 1990 that she “delivers that death-trap injunction to Benedick, ‘Kill Claudio’, with such intensity that not a titter runs through the house. This is real acting.”82 Billington commented on Harriet Walter’s delivery of the line too: “the exchanges (in the Church scene) between Harriet Walter’s Beatrice and Nicholas le Prévost’s Benedick are charged with a heady mix of eroticism and violence. Walter’s demand that he ‘Kill Claudio’ springs out of an incandescent fury that leads her to kick over the church pews.”83 Tamsin Greig in the 2006 production spilled out the line amid a torrent of tears and kisses, sometimes evoking a laugh from the audience and sometimes an awed hush.
Claudio and Hero
Technically, the Claudio–Hero plot is the play’s main plot, but they are invariably overshadowed. Finding the balance between the pleasure of the Beatrice–Benedick plot and the pain of the Hero–Claudio one emerges as more of an issue in later productions. In 1961, Michael Langham made little of the pain and Michael Billington noted the difficulties created for this part of the play by the very English setting of Ronald Eyre’s 1971 production, lacking as it did “Italian ardor.” The golden glow of the English garden in Bill Alexander’s 1992 production similarly marginalized Hero’s suffering, though Alex Kingston was a touching Hero.
In 1968, Trevor Nunn took t
he Hero–Claudio–Don John plot as its dark focus, and though the Claudio was generally felt by critics to be undercast, Helen Mirren was a moving Hero, playing her as barely more than a child, wide-eyed and excited at the prospect of marriage, a true lamb to the slaughter. In Barton’s 1976 production, Cherie Lunghi played an appealing Hero and Richard Durden a heartless Claudio who was as “coldly frivolous” after the disgrace of Hero as he had been before. Billington observed that the two plots melded unusually well because Don John’s plot against Claudio and Hero was a particularly vicious extension of the practical jokes indulged in by a heartless officer class.84
The cruelty of Hero’s treatment, not only by Don John and Claudio but by her own father, was strongly emphasized in Di Trevis’ 1988 production. Ralph Fiennes played a particularly unpleasant, smug, sycophantic Claudio, and Irving Wardle noted: “There is perhaps more substance in the production’s feminist angle: as where Hero (Julia Ford) collapses in church and is immediately surrounded by a flock of sympathetic girls, while the men all retire to nurse their personal grievances.”85
In Gregory Doran’s 2002 production, the Sicilian setting supported the play’s masculine honor code and the mood shifted successfully from sun-drenched comedy to the darkness of Hero’s betrayal:
Doran also captures the darkness which casts such threatening shadows over this golden comedy. The great scene in which that callow gold-digger Claudio (excellent John Hopkins) accuses Hero of being a whore during their wedding ceremony is played with real psychological perception and packs a devastating and painful dramatic punch. When even Hero’s loving father viciously turns on her, the eggshell surface of the comedy cracks to reveal the possibility of real tragedy.86
5. In Di Trevis’ 1988 RSC production, when Julia Ford as Hero collapsed, she was “immediately surrounded by a flock of sympathetic girls, while the men all retire[d] to nurse their personal grievances.”
John Hopkins played Claudio as a man genuinely hurt as well as wounded in his pride, and Kirsten Parker was a deeply affecting Hero, “who, in the rejection scene, retains all the dignity of a princess.”87 With a skilled director’s touch, Doran later had the wan face of Hero, immured indoors, look down from an upstairs window to see her now penitent father cradling her bridal veil.
In the salsa-filled Cuban setting of 2006, director Marianne Elliott made no attempt to keep the mood light in the second half: the bright lights went out in the interval, literally darkening the atmosphere: “The pain of the wedding scene in which Morven Christie’s sweet young Hero is so vilely traduced by Adam Rayner’s cruel, callow Claudio achieves a bruising tragic intensity.”88
Of all the productions, Michael Boyd’s in 1996 went furthest in giving main-plot status to this thread in the play. Emily Bruni as Hero was withdrawn and unsmiling, passive in her acquiescence to an arranged marriage and traumatized by what followed.
Minor Roles
The role of Don John has been a jumping-off point for several young actors who would go on to highly successful careers both in the RSC and outside it. Several critics noted a “cankerous” performance in 1961 by a young Ian Richardson, who played Don John with a “sinister stammer,”89 and in 1971, Richard Pasco, too, was a “canker” in the otherwise sunny Victorian garden, playing Don John as a viciously repressed homosexual. In 1996, reviewing the production which strikingly foregrounded Don John’s plot against Claudio, Alastair Macaulay comments: “a very impressive young actor brings Don John to life with a nervous, laughing loutishness that is both dangerous and naïve,”90 while de Jongh writes: “The remarkable Damian Lewis plays this villain as a suave but passionate malcontent, who puts a disarming face upon sheer evil.”91 1n 1968, Don John’s lieutenants, Conrad and Borachio, were played with villainous perfection by two young actors, Ben Kingsley and Patrick Stewart.
In Bill Alexander’s 1990 production, critics singled out John Carlisle:
The most complete performance of the evening comes from John Carlisle as Don Pedro. This is no princely cipher but an ageing Cavalier, shrouded in solitude, hungry for emotional contact. Mr Carlisle enters into the proxy wooing of Hero with suspicious enthusiasm and proposes to Beatrice with direct urgency. He creates a character where on the page one barely exists.92
The Dogberry–Verges–Watch scenes are difficult to pull off, and actors and directors often seem to be trying too hard. “Frenziedly overpitched,” says Billington of Terry Hands’ 1982 production.93 David Waller played a richly comic, pompous, bucolic Dogberry in Nunn’s 1968 production, in fine contrast to Clifford Rose’s delicate Verges; John Woodvine’s Sikh Dogberry in Barton’s 1976 production was generally praised as bringing fresh comedy to Dogberry’s malapropisms and self-importance. Audiences would be less comfortable with the implied racial attitudes now, and even then, as one critic commented cuttingly, “You only need to raise a finger and a Paki accent and you’re home.”94 Marianne Elliott in 2006 tried to inject humor into Dogberry by casting Bette Bourne as an outrageously camp officer, accessorizing his uniform with a pink suspender belt and lipstick, making him appear like “a slightly scary low-rent drag queen.”95
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH MARIANNE ELLIOTT AND NICHOLAS HYTNER
Marianne Elliott was born in 1967 into a distinguished theatrical family and brought up in Manchester where her father was co-founder of the Manchester Royal Exchange. She studied drama at Hull University, but spent some years working in a variety of jobs unconnected with the theater before working as a casting director and then setting up her own company, Small Talk. She was subsequently appointed artistic director at the Manchester Royal Exchange. Her production of Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes with Penelope Wilton at the Donmar Warehouse in 2001 was highly praised, and she went on to become an associate director at London’s Royal Court. She has directed numerous successful productions as an associate director at the National, including an adaptation of Émile Zola’s Thérèse Raquin, Michael Morpurgo’s War Horse, Shaw’s St. Joan, and Samuel Adamson’s Mrs Affleck. She was nominated for an Evening Standard theater award for her 2005 production of Ibsen’s Pillars of the Community. Marianne directed the highly acclaimed 2006 production of Much Ado About Nothing in the Swan Theatre for the RSC Complete Works Festival with Tamsin Greig as Beatrice and Joseph Millson as Benedick.
Nicholas Hytner was appointed director of the National Theatre in 2003. He was born in Manchester in 1956 and, after attending Manchester Grammar School, read English at Cambridge. He was associate director of Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre from 1985 to 1989 and at the National from 1989 to 1997. He was a visiting professor of contemporary theater at Oxford University in 2000–01, and is an honorary fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He is credited with revolutionizing the National Theatre artistically and with attracting large new audiences by producing bold, original work. He has directed many plays from the classical repertoire, including King Lear and The Tempest at the RSC and The Winter’s Tale, Henry V, The Alchemist, and Phèdre at the National. His long-standing collaboration with the playwright Alan Bennett includes The Madness of George III and The History Boys at the National. His films include The Madness of King George, The Crucible, and The History Boys. He directed Zoë Wanamaker and Simon Russell Beale in Much Ado About Nothing in 2007–08.
What sort of a world was your Messina? Did you give particular attention to the element of soldiers returning from the war, the transition from the battlefield to the battle of the sexes?
Elliott: Our Messina was Cuba around 1953, just after a rebel uprising had been crushed. The soldiers are victorious and ready to celebrate, get drunk, meet girls, etc. It’s party time.
I felt the setting needed to be an imperialistic and patriarchal society. Men and women are viewed and treated very differently, hence their battling. It is also a society that is rather exotic and glamorous; like Italy was viewed by the English when Shakespeare wrote the play. Hence Cuba felt right. It’s a place where there’s a merging between public and private
places, between street and house. This helped the in and out scenes: the outside party/festival feel and the more private family scenes. Cuba is a place that can hum to the beat of music. We used the rhythms of the time, which had a feel like the Buena Vista Social Club. Ours was a world where music was very much part of the soul of the people; the atmosphere was hot, sexy, and sweaty with an air of machismo. It’s tropical, it’s possibly a bit wild, and it’s nothing like England! Cuba is somewhere we recognize as a sophisticated, glamorous, Latino place with a holiday feel, but at that time it had a darker side. In 1953, just before the revolution, it was in a flux of change, just like the characters in the play.
Hytner: Leonato’s household is made up of many women and a couple of old men. It’s very deliberately a testosterone-free zone. Its femininity is more interesting, and more unusual, than the locker-room machismo of the army. An army which isn’t returning home incidentally—it’s a mercenary army, presumably recruited from all over Italy, commanded by a Spaniard on behalf of the Spanish crown, billeting itself temporarily before further action. It’s more like the army in Three Sisters—disrupting a sleepy backwater—but, there’s no suspicion that Messina is dead without it. We took care to create an easy-going, hospitable household, very Sicilian. Its first instinct is to throw a party. You don’t get the impression that it is in any way incomplete before the army arrives. On the contrary, it seems content and at ease with itself. It’s quite hard to negotiate through the first forty-five minutes without repeated gales of cheesy stage laughter.
The battle between Beatrice and Benedick seems to me to be less a battle between the sexes than a painful, and very funny, mutual baptism. They have in common a refusal to take the plunge: they cast themselves instead in the same roles in relation to the largely single-sex worlds to which they have resigned themselves. They are both their respective “prince’s fool,” and there is in both an underlying unhappiness with the corner they’ve painted themselves into. Their banter is a front for their emotional dishonesty; the “mountain of affection” is the elephant in the room and Don Pedro’s therapeutic trick makes it impossible for them to ignore it. We played our gulling scene around a pool. Both jumped in it to hide. They took the plunge, literally.
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