So, I heard about this production over the summer, and was really disappointed that I couldn’t see it, for several reasons. Firstly, Much Ado about Nothing is one of my favorite plays of Shakespeare’s, and definitely at the top of his comedies for me. Why? Beatrice and Benedick are just so incredibly hilarious, in addition to being one of Shakespeare’s most believable couples. Also, I am a big fan of David Tennant, both as the Doctor and in Shakespeare roles. Catherine Tate’s style is not always my favorite, but I know she has chemistry with him, and I was willing to give her a shot. Unfortunately, I was in America all summer long and never had the chance to see it.
When I found out it could be downloaded and watched on Digital Theater, I was over the moon with excitement. And? Did it fulfill my dreams? Not particularly.
It was undoubtedly very funny. I laughed right through it, as did the rest of the audience on the night it was recorded. There were some individual scenes that sparkled, and David Tennant was as consistently enjoyable, as I knew he would be. I thought Don John was brilliantly cast- closeted, bitter and totally detached. His discomfort in his own skin writhed beneath everything he said, particularly in the stag scene in which he stands uncomfortably off to the side, unaffected by the excitement and strippers. Hero and Claudio played their parts acceptably, but with very little to comment on. I found them more unlikeable here than in other versions I’ve seen, which is not necessarily a bad thing. Dogberry is a character that has not necessarily aged well, with his overly camp mistakes and malapropisms. In other productions I’ve seen, I’ve just waited out his scenes, hoping it would get back to the interesting bits soon. Unlike then, this Dogberry was entirely hilarious, managing to wring every ounce of humor from the character without going over the top with the mugging or slapstick.
For the most part, I thought David Tennant was excellent. He got the most of any of the actors out of the slapstick in the first half, and in the second half played his heartfelt love and equally heartfelt resistance with beauty. I particularly loved his scene trying to write a love song for Beatrice, and his confrontation of Claudio. My issue with him was the rapid transition between Benedick of the first half and Benedick of the second. In the first half, when Beatrice refers to him as the Prince’s jester, the insult seems entirely on target. The men keep him around because he’s hilarious and irreverent. He’s the butt of their jokes, and a constant attention seeker: the class clown who never grew up. His scenes alone show a greater depth of character than when he is with others, accentuating the point that much of his tomfoolery is really an act put on as a cry for attention. However, the Benedick of the second half is an entirely different man. In the second half he’s deeply emotional, filled with inner steel and convictions. He’s the only man who refuses to believe Hero is guilty, who stood by with a stern face of horror as the whole wedding fiasco went down. Most of the time, he’s serious, almost stern in mannerism. The transition just felt far too rapid for me. I couldn’t get a handle on why the character did such a complete one eighty right in the middle. Both sides of this Benedick worked, but if he was trying to make a single, credible character, he didn’t succeed. The silliness could have worked, had he managed to portray the steel beneath it all, which he should have been able to do quite well, seeing as he just spent four years on Doctor Who doing “steel beneath silliness”. It didn’t tie together, but his scenes in both halves were the most consistently good of anything in the play.
However, a lot of that good stuff was offset by some very poor decisions.
My main complaint is that they rarely stepped back and let the text speak for itself. It wasn’t enough for them to have a hilarious play filled with hilarious text. They had to smear their actors with paint, and hoist them from the ceiling. They had to gasp, grin and overact, as if the humor inherent in their words wasn’t enough to make the audience laugh. There were some truly hilarious moments when they scaled it back and let the text and characters speak for themselves, particularly with Benedick and Dogberry. I don’t have an objection to Shakespeare being lewd, dirty and slightly slapstick, because that’s what his comedies are. But this felt almost like apologizing for the play being written by Shakespeare, as though they doubted his ability to make us laugh without inserting a throwaway gag in between every line.
Catherine Tate was particularly frustrating in this respect. In most of her scenes she could barely restrain from gasping for minutes on end, screaming for minutes on end, and hopping around waving her arms. It was distracting, impressively unfunny, and made for several moments where I, as a viewer, felt keenly embarrassed for her. The fact that the audience laughed instead of gasped when she asked Benedick to kill Claudio sort of sums up what was wrong with her performance. It was all the more a shame too; when she dialed it back she was both funny and touching. Her chemistry with David Tennant is quite plain, particularly in the scene where they banter about his “bad parts” and her “good ones”. The comedy was scaled back enough that I laughed instead of winced, and their relationship came through stunningly. If only they had resisted the urge to overdo it most of the rest of the time.
I have little preference as to whether Shakespeare is set in modern times, Shakespeare’s time or anything in between. As long as the story works in the setting that was chosen, and the setting doesn’t distract from the core of the play, I don’t particularly care. Sometimes sets can be used to very clever effect, like the omnipresent cameras used in Tennant’s Hamlet from 2009, but I usually think it’s best to let the setting interfere with the story as little as possible. I’ve heard most people loved the 1980’s Gibraltar setting, but I couldn’t stand it. The excessively long dance numbers seemed quite beside the point to me, but my main issue with it was that it rendered the story entirely illogical. The Gibraltar in this play is sex-saturated, particularly in the stag night scenes. Claudio smiles knowingly when his friends bring out a stripper, and Margaret flirts unabashedly with every male around. I don’t object to the sexuality, but in the context of this story, it makes no sense. The world of Much Ado is one where discovering your bride is not a virgin is cause to publically disavow her and cause for her father to want to disown her. It’s a world where a woman could conceivably die from the horror of such an insult. In some other plays that could be fine, but by setting this play in a world of omnipresent and accepted sexuality, it just makes no sense. It still perhaps could have worked had Hero and Claudio been played as two romantic souls at odds with the world around them, but they were both wholly a part of it. When Hero protested that she was a maiden, I actually laughed out loud, and when Claudio railed against her dishonesty, I wanted to yank him aside and ask about that stripper he’d been having such a good time with. It just didn’t make sense. They moved the story into a time where the fundamental elements of the plot didn’t work.
There were several other more minor decisions made that seemed very strange to me. One was when they had Claudio try to kill himself in Hero’s tomb. It was gratuitous and unnecessary. Perhaps it was in there to make him more sympathetic? I’m not sure, but it just didn’t work for me. He was just as unlikeable as before, and instead of being touching, it was overwrought. The other strange decision was that they decided to give Hero a mother. In the play, Hero is motherless, and the decision to add in a mother and then have her do virtually nothing at all seemed very strange. Had she been assigned more lines or given a significant silent role, the decision could have been at least interesting, but adding her in and then ignoring her seemed a strange decision to make. Shakespeare’s exclusion of a maternal figure in the story seems very pointed, and I’m not sure it was a good decision to mess with that without a very good reason.
Overall, it was enjoyable, but there was just too much of everything except genuine emotion. The darkness that runs straight through the play just didn’t come through, and when it did, the mood shift felt too rapid and unexplained. Quite a bit of fun, but not much substance.
No comments:
Post a Comment