Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Simon Godwin
Coming so soon after The Globe’s version, it feels that there’s a lot resting on the National’s Much Ado About Nothing. At The Globe the laughs – and the occasional shock – come easily, but at the National, style usurps storytelling with its 1920s jazzy setting. With more costume changes than a Cher farewell concert, Simon Godwin’s Much Ado certainly looks the part, but doesn’t deliver the nuances of Shakespeare’s comedy.
Katherine Parkinson plays Beatrice; however she’s not the lovable unromantic we are used to seeing. Arriving at the check-in desk of the Hotel Messina in a halo of paparazzi flashes, we must presume Beatrice is a movie star, complete with Hollywood shallowness. She remains aloof throughout the play and we never get to know her. It doesn’t help that Parkinson sometimes swallows her lines, which means that her facial expressions often do the work that Shakespeare’s words should be doing. The opening scenes where she disparages men and married life are rushed and bring few laughs.
Fortunately John Heffernan’s Benedick is more likeable, but he’s a bit of a drip. While Heffernan is funny, and importantly always clear, he’s not besotted with Beatrice in any way. In fact, there’s no sense that these two are in love with each other at all, even obliviously so. Their sparring lacks any flirtatious spirit that usually makes their fractious relationship believable. Luckily, Parkinson and Heffernan win over the audience with their eavesdropping scenes, especially the latter when he’s covered in ice cream.
All told, perhaps it’s just as well that Beatrice and Benedick aren’t the main focus here; in Godwin’s production, the romance between Hero and Claudio is foregrounded. Godwin also tries to fix Shakespeare’s sudden move into tragedy by having Claudio appear fully repentant in his belief that Hero is not ‘a maid’. And Eben Figueiredo really does seem sorry and it’s hard not to like him, even though some of his words (but never the metre) get lost in his Multicultural London English (MLE) accent.
Hero has a nicer time of it too; her battle is with Claudio only. Godwin has toned down the anger of her father Leonato who also wishes her dead when it is believed she is cheating on Claudio. When Leonato does get angry, Rufus Wright rather ruins it by slurring his lines and so it seems as if Hero has the full support of her family, which means that Ioanna Kimbook’s Hero doesn’t cut such a tragic figure. With such emphasis on the plot to separate Hero and Claudio, Parkinson and Heffernan must spend most of the second half silent and aghast.
But if the emotional layers of Much Ado are a little fudged, there is still plenty to admire in the spectacular clothes by Evie Gurney. The men, in their high-waisted linen trousers and their crisp shirts, or in their series of stunning army uniforms, completely outshine the women in the fashion stakes though Beatrice’s many items of headwear come a close second. Set in Sicily, Anna Fleischle’s sandstone hotel (along with some of the music) instead suggests Central America. The front of the hotel elegantly opens up to reveal a few interiors, but overall it seems to be located too near the front of the stage forcing other scenes to be played awkwardly on either side of the building.
It may be a slow start, but as the play moves to its resolution and as Dogberry (ingeniously reimagined as hotel security) begins his investigations the audience is eager to applause every scene. And for the last 20 minutes or so the production soars. If only the first half could match the clarity of the second the National’s production could be a hit. The opening scenes are played in such a rush there is no time to fashion a chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick, and without that crucial relationship this really is much ado about nothing.
Runs until 10 September 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Rushed
