WINNERS, WAGS AND WRONGS
Well, here’s a summer romp. Hot on the heels of Tom Hiddleston in a disco version up Drury Lane, here’s the RSC take on one of the sunniest Shakespeare comedy melodramas: and its setting also picks up the rage for stage football in the reprise of Dear England at the NT. For Shakespeare’s returning warriors are modern footballers. It’s not soldiers from a war but Messina FC team-mates, ushered in by sounds of roaring crowds and manic chants, who are plotting to create a love-match between the bickering Beatrice and Benedick. And who themselves (especially big dim Claudio) are easily fooled into suspecting and ‘cancelling’ Hero . The villainous Don John, credibly enough, is stumping around in a surgical boot, possibly embittered by too long on the subs’ bench.
Michael Longhurst directs with energetic brio, though the first half goes on a bit too long due to a glut of set-piece larking, masking, shrieking, chanting, a glimpsed blow-job and various entertaining collapses into the onstage pool by gentleman with and without their shorts on. Freema Agyeman’s Beatrice is a sports broadcaster, Peter Forbes’ Leonato the club owner, who delivers a memorable rendering of “My Way” in the party scene. Benedick (emphasis on the last syllable at one point from Beatrice) is a likeable Nick Blood: he’s one of several RSC debut castings and deserves to collar a good few of the coming physical-comedy leads: has lovely timing in the overhearing scenes and no fear of a pratfall.
They all put plenty of energy into it, but there is a slight weirdness in translating a story of traduced honour , chastity and dignity into this particular modern world, where for the first half there is little clue that any of the characters are familiar with such words. Except, perhaps, in one lovely chilling moment when Don Pedro, the prince, propositions Beatrice and she refuses , fears she has gone too far and turns it – hastily – to a joke against herself. Agyeman does give Beatrice dignity: that shows more, later, in her bitter rage at Claudio after the. wedding.
Indeed it is the second half that caught me up more than the first . (Which is not to deny that the audience was having great fun all the way through, and I suspect the youngest will adore it). As the plot darkens for Hero the projection of innumerable tweets, faux-sympathetic or bitchy, along the roof and gallery walls creates a real modern sense of reputational threat around her. The late line after her ‘resurrection’ is met with “She died, my lord, but while her slander lived” and that feels very modern.
So, indeed, do the Watch, security heavies whose scenes are run to just the right length, and Antonio Magro’s magnificently offended Dogberry will stick in the mind for a good while. And there was a more satisfying sense of the play’s completeness by the time the familiar plot has finally played out, with Beatrice and Benedick finding one another and Lenato’s crazed rage at his daughter tamped down by his wife Antonia. Indeed Tanya Franks’ ferocious matriarchal dignity , like Beatrice’s raging defence of her cousin, do finally make the obviously intended point about the way women are treated in the world of male professional football: chattels valued or despised with equal wrongness.
The use of video projection is clever – it’s a telly world we’re in – and Jon Bausor’s designs and costumes are entertainingly spot-on, from dopey Hero’s ridiculous bubble-dress and the wedding’s balloon-arch and tutus to all the insane beachwear round the pool, and Leonato’s camel coat slung over the shoulders.
The only visual howler is , chaps, that if you are going to put Beatrice in a slinky party gown and then make her sit casually for a moment on the side of a pool latterly full of splashing footballers, she should then not have to walk away and repeatedly show her back view with a great wet suspicious bum mark. For minutes on end. Women just don’t like that, chaps: it’d drive us straight out to change, possibly walking backwards in mortification. Moreover, there is no way that the crude young male characters, as drawn in this riotous party scene, would not have rudely roasted her over it. Either dry the poolside or reblock the scene. Seriously, do….this cool Beatrice deserves better.
Rsc.org.uk to 24 may
Rating. 3
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