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Farcical rom com a real hoot
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING
St Stephen’s Church, Belsize Park
FRANCE, 1945. The war is over, Paris liberated, the Führer toppled and the victorious returning troops of Don Pedro are looking to conquer a new and very different (if just as formidable) opposition – women.
If you thought your friends were bad at setting you up with the opposite sex, wait till you see the carrying on of the meddling factions of Shakespeare’s Much Ado.
Orbiting the fractious relationship of the acid-tongued Beatrice (the wonderfully condescending Anouk Brook), and the equally bellicose Benedick (a disarmingly affable Ashley Cook), Antic Disposition’s production of Shakespeare’s thick plot of match-making, gossip and eavesdropping is imbued with a genteel, English sensibility, despite praiseworthy attempts by the design and music departments at Frenchifying proceedings.
The young female coterie of Hero and Margaret giggle demurely while Don Pedro and his inexperienced protégé Claudio attempt their military-style manoeuvres of seduction. Don Pedro doesn’t have a girl but, being the boss, he wants to show his young apprentice how it’s done.
Romance is a young person’s game we are told, but just as the flirtatious bickerings of the older, world-weary Beatrice and vowed bachelor Benedick in the end prove their compatibility, the strategems of courtship require a wiser head.
If the idyllic courtship of Hero by Don Pedro in lieu of Claudio gets a bit sickly and the matchmaking of sworn enemies Beatrice and Benedick borders on slapstick, the brooding presence of the excellent Damien Warren-Smith as Don Pedro’s embittered brother Don John, along with a menacing performance by Chris Waplington as his sidekick Borachio, injects a much-needed edge that overshadows the flippant naïvety of the young lovers and the frustrating ease of their happiness.
Things pick up for the bitter and disenfranchised in love in the second half. Claudio comes out of his shell to (wrongly) confront his betrothed at the altar – a fitting scene given the setting – and the bumbling Dogberry, played with relish by Jonathan Pembroke, adds some welcome light relief in his accidental uncovering of Don John and Borachio’s plot. Robert French as Leonarto almost over-eggs the importance of Hero’s faked death with some overwrought scenes towards the end of the play that perhaps skate over the subtle irony of the deception, but the return of Beatrice and Benedick and the reconciliation of all parties is skilfully managed by a cast that copes admirably with the size and acoustics of this beautiful yet challenging space.
Whether in love or out, French or Anglais, this production of Much Ado has a bit of everything.
Until July 19
0871 2200 260 |
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