Every age, we kid ourselves, gets the Shakespeare it deserves—or, with any luck, the Shakespeare it badly needs. Take a famous example: to read about the Federal Theatre Project’s production of “Macbeth” that opened at the Lafayette Theatre, in Harlem, in 1936, performed by an all-Black cast and directed by Orson Welles, is to be overwhelmed by a sense of something that had to happen. Any witch could see it coming. But what about eras of even greater distraction and disarray? Do we want only as much Shakespeare as we can cope with, and no more?
A fresh light—and a glaring one—is being shone on these murky matters by a new production of “Much Ado About Nothing” at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, in London. The calling card of the show is its stars, and the public has answered the call. I went to a matinée, on a gray Thursday, and the place was packed, in anticipation of the leading lovers. Benedick is played by Tom Hiddleston and Beatrice by Hayley Atwell; in other words, if you are a Marvel fan, by the man who plays Loki in three “Avengers” movies and three helpings of “Thor,” plus the woman who plays Peggy Carter. (For the uninitiated, she’s a British agent of Second World War vintage, chock-full of pluck, who pals up with Captain America.) At one point, in the midst of “Much Ado,” full-length cardboard cutouts of Hiddleston and Atwell, in their Marvel costumes, are carried onstage, to squeals of knowing delight: meta made easy.
The stage of the Theatre Royal is wide and deep, and it can be tricky to fill. (Decades ago, it was a venue of choice for Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. “Frozen” played there for three years. Next up, post-Shakespeare, is an adaptation of Disney’s “Hercules.”) For most of “Much Ado,” which is directed by Jamie Lloyd, the vast expanse of the stage is littered with pink confetti—heaped so high, in one scene, that Benedick gets to roll around in it as if romping in autumn leaves. The props, by contrast, are pretty much confined to ten chairs, on which some of the characters tend to perch while listening to others speak. By and large, they wear the same outfit from the first to the last scene. Whether this style of presentation has a technical name, I’m not sure. Over-the-top minimalism? Stripped-down camp? Either way, I suppose, it saves money.
In a curious parallel, across town, something similar is in motion. On an equally capacious stage, at the Barbican Theatre, another classic play—Chekhov’s “The Seagull”—has been simultaneously pared down and juiced up. Once again, it is crowned by a major name; the heroine, a self-anointing actress named Irina, is played by Cate Blanchett. Instead of confetti, we get a thicket of tall foliage, through which the characters rustle into view. Otherwise, the accoutrements consist of a quad bike, a golf cart, the statutory shotgun, and not much more. The chairs on which the actors sit number not ten but a yet more radical seven. Before the action gets under way, one character enters, picks up an electric guitar, banters with the audience, and then plays “The Milkman of Human Kindness,” a raucously plaintive song by the British protest singer Billy Bragg.
Can “Much Ado” match that? You bet. If it’s period drama you’re seeking, I have bad news: this production is low on lutes. Instead, the entertainment starts as Margaret (Mason Alexander Park) serenades us with “Tell It to My Heart”—a club standard first heard in the late nineteen-eighties. Still to come, scattered through the show: “Fight for Your Right,” by the Beastie Boys, Missy Elliott’s “Work It,” and other tunes meant to reassure us that going to the theatre is, or should be, more of an impromptu rave and less of a stolid cultural chore. By the final curtain, that persuasive mission, as even the most scowling purist will admit, has been accomplished. The cast gaily busts a collective move, to the strains of “When Love Takes Over,” and the audience stands and claps in time to the beat. What is more, the actors are in complete obedience to the last line of the play. “Strike up, pipers,” Benedick proclaims, and a stage direction backs him up: “Dance, and then exeunt.”
The reputation of “Much Ado About Nothing” as a crowd-pleaser is hardly new. Appended to an edition of Shakespeare, in 1640, was a hobbling but informative poem by a man named Leonard Digges, who told us of a crowd that was ripe for the pleasing: “Let but Beatrice / And Benedick be seen, lo in a trice / The Cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full.” His emphasis on the main couple, to the exclusion of everyone else, set a tone that has persisted for centuries. No one has ever rushed to the theatre for the sake of Hero and Claudio, the secondary lovers, whose wooings and sunderings, though eventful, seem like very small beer compared with the rich flirtatious spirits of the primary pair. King Charles I, in his copy of Shakespeare, went so far as to cross out the title of the play and to write “Beatrice and Benedick” beside it—a preferential upgrade that was echoed, more than two centuries later, by Berlioz, whose comic opera is called “Béatrice et Bénédict.” The composer described it as “a caprice written with the point of a needle.”
But Berlioz the whittler didn’t stop there. Though he retained Hero and Claudio, he cut out not only Don John, the malcontent who sets the plot spinning, but also Dogberry, the clownish constable in charge of arresting and questioning any suspicious persons. The opera thus reduces the complex narrative of the play to two acts; by a nice coincidence, so does the latest “Much Ado,” which comes in two manageable chunks and, with an interval, lasts a little more than two hours. The logic must be tempting, I guess: if you’re going to lure the public in with movie stars, why not enhance the illusion by making us sit there for the length of a movie? To be honest, I was kind of disappointed not to be offered a box of annoyingly noisy popcorn and a live-action trailer for “Hercules.”
Like “Béatrice et Bénédict,” the new “Much Ado” is Dogberry-free. Does this matter? Not to anyone who has ever sat through a lousy production of the play, perhaps at college, and found the character’s linguistic errors—his trademark—to be about as funny as athlete’s foot. Yet we do need Dogberry, not least because he is such a revealing foil for Beatrice and Benedick. Far though they outrank him on the intellectual and social scale, the lovers remain, to a degree that they can’t always bring themselves to recognize, as trapped by their surfeit of verbal dexterity as he is by his ham-fisted fumblings with the language. Words may wound, God knows, but they can also shield us from uncomfortable thrusts of feeling. (“Shall quips and sentences and these paper bullets of the brain awe a man from the career of his humor?” Benedick asks.) Also, to do Dogberry justice, his doltishness does, on occasion, drag him into accidental wisdom; when, in high dudgeon, he exclaims, “O villain! Thou wilt be condemned into everlasting redemption for this,” the wrongness of the abstract noun—he means “damnation”—bumps into the mood of forgiveness for which, as spectators of comedy, we instinctively pray.
As for the villainy, well, Don John is present and correct at Drury Lane, but, like the rest of the supporting characters, he makes alarmingly little impact—barely a dent in one’s memory, after the play is done. On the page, it’s true, Don John is no Iago, yet in his minor malignity he is implacable enough (“I cannot hide what I am”), and the fruits of his mischief could not be more rotten: it’s because of him that Claudio winds up spitting slander at the innocent Hero, who then pretends to be dead. This production, however, has no time for nastiness, which slides off the shining surface of the revelry. It’s almost as if wickedness were an embarrassment, when there is fun to be had; as if any mention of violence would somehow be bad manners. Were you to quiz members of the audience after the show, how many of them would recall that the story began with the menfolk, Benedick included, returning from war? Or that the very last promise that Benedick makes before he gets everyone dancing is to think about appropriate tortures to inflict on Don John, now in custody? “Think not on him till tomorrow; I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him.”
What we get from this new “Much Ado” is less ado than usual. It is not a travesty of the play, by any means, but it’s a shrinkage, and, I suspect, a harbinger of further diminutions. Such is the current state of the world that people are more entitled than ever to a blast of music and merriment, devoid of unsavory downsides. To borrow an alliterative phrase from “Much Ado,” not every drama is duty-bound “to apply a moral medicine to a mortifying mischief.” Anybody who asks for more from this new production, therefore, or who points out what is missing, risks the charge of being the merest killjoy.
Then again, Shakespeare himself keeps reminding us that joy is in perpetual danger of being killed; that it may, in fact, be all the more precious for being cradled between episodes of brutality and grief. “She hath often dreamed of unhappiness and waked herself with laughing,” Beatrice’s father says of her. (A strange prefiguring, in reverse, of Caliban’s confession in “The Tempest”: “When I waked, / I cried to dream again.”) How easy it is to forget, as Rosalind sports with love in the Forest of Arden, in “As You Like It,” that she has fled there on pain of death, and how unprepared we are, every time we watch “Much Ado,” for the shock of Beatrice’s command to Benedick, as plain as a punch, when he suavely undertakes to do her bidding: “Kill Claudio.”
Judi Dench, in “Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent,” her wonderfully acute and earthy book of interviews about his plays, lays down the law on that astonishing moment. “The line ‘Kill Claudio’ very occasionally got a laugh when I said it. I feel it shouldn’t, though—perhaps a nervous laugh—but it should be a gasp, an intake of breath.” I am glad to report that Atwell, in Drury Lane, draws the right response: all gasp and no laugh. Amid an afternoon of froth and folderol, she knocks us back on our heels and shuts us up. I saw Atwell play Isabella, in “Measure for Measure,” in 2018, and the principled candor that she displayed there emerges anew in her Beatrice, who interrupts her duel of wits, with Benedick, for the sake of solidarity with Hero. The strong woman stands by her friend, a weaker soul, who has been sorely maligned. If Benedick can’t handle such resolve, more fool him. All he can do is hold his tongue while her rage at Claudio turns cannibalistic: “O God, that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the marketplace.”
Addicts of the iambic pentameter are starved by “Much Ado.” Scarcely more than a quarter of it is in verse; no Shakespeare play is prosier, except for “The Merry Wives of Windsor.” In a fine formal twist, though, it is the callow couple, Hero and Claudio, who are more liable to utter lines of poetry than the sophisticates. Only fitfully do Beatrice and Benedick break their habit of jousting prose. The most startling exception is the scene in which Beatrice, having overheard herself being mocked for her pride, launches into a sudden sonnet—jumping into a traditional vehicle for the lovesick, that is, as if eager to prove that she is not, after all, too smart to be swept along.
Mostly, the play relies on a flow of intimate chat, and it’s a crying, not to say deafening, shame that the performers at Drury Lane are armed with head microphones. (Dench again: “I worry nowadays about actors being miked as I think it flattens everything out.”) Too many of them continue to bellow their lines despite the amplification, and it’s up to Hiddleston and Atwell, once more, to dial things down. Nowhere but in their company do we feel the privilege of eavesdropping on the amity of clever grownups, battle-scarred by time. When Hiddleston turns to us and says, “Man is a giddy thing, and this is my conclusion,” he doesn’t sound like a roué, tossing out an axiom for effect. He seems like someone who has finally arrived at inward clarity, after a hell of a ride.
So, that’s the joke: “Much Ado About Nothing,” in this instance, is saved by the inhabitants of Marvel. Not all celebrity casting is a gimmick, and, whenever “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is next mounted Off Broadway, I look forward to seeing Spider-Man as Cobweb, Pepper Potts as Mustardseed, and Groot as Flute. For now, anyone who is lucky enough to grab a ticket to the London production, flawed as it is, will be treated to the spectacle of Loki and Agent Carter, superpowered by little more than steel-tipped repartee—by everything that lies at their wits’ end and beyond. Indeed, on the strength of their kissing, as the play winds up, we know exactly what comes next, in the headlong lives of Beatrice and Benedick. As somebody remarks, “If they were but a week married, they would talk themselves mad.” Maybe so, but most of the talking, and all of the madness, will take place in bed. ♦
