Sex and Candy

Much Ado About Nothing
the Stratford Festival
The National Post

The church scene in Much Ado About Nothing is one of the most notorious booby traps in Shakespeare. It's the point at which the comedy's two major plot lines collide. Claudio, the callow young army officer, is scheduled to marry Hero, daughter of the city governor on whom he and his fellows have been billeted. Tricked into believing that his fiancee has been unfaithful, he abandons her at the altar and stalks out, followed by all his comrades save one. The exception is Benedick, the previously confirmed bachelor, who's influenced partly by a basic decency and partly by his dawning love for Hero's cousin Beatrice, a love that she, a previously confirmed spinster, reciprocates. They too have been tricked, in this case benevolently, by friends and relations who have sensed, rightly, that they were made for one another. Benedick asks what he can do to prove his love, and Beatrice takes him up on it. She says "kill Claudio."

The abruptness of this has traditionally raised a laugh, and productions have often been judged on their ability to avoid it. I don't know whether Christopher Newton, in his new Stratford production, wanted to avoid it, but if he did, he hasn't succeeded - at least not at the performance I saw. Sought for or not, the laugh on this occasion doesn't sink the scene; it may even enrich it. Actors Ben Carlson and Deborah Hay bounce right back, riding a wave of mingled passion and absurdity, rich in action and reaction. They are fairly funny, but very moving.

This is the unexpected direction in which they have been tending throughout an uneven but generally intelligent production. Carlson has been pointing his lines with his usual adroitness, but the "merry war" in which he and Beatrice have been engaged (as distinct from the un-merry one from which he has just returned) doesn't seem all that witty. Maybe it's Shakespeare's fault. Hay as Beatrice makes the stronger impression, maybe because her character is more vulnerable. It's plain that she and Benedick have been around the block before, and that she still carries the scars. When she speaks the famous bittersweet lines about the dancing star under which she was born while her mother cried, she's very affecting.

Surprisingly too, when it comes to the twin eavesdropping scenes in which each is apprised of the other's supposed love, it's Beatrice who makes the stronger impression. Generally, her turn is an anti-climax, because it comes second and is in verse in a play whose liveliest scenes are in prose. In this production, though, Carlson is kept unobtrusively in the background for his deception while the deceivers talk among themselves - very entertainingly, as they seem as intent on scoring points off one another as they do on tricking him. Hay, by contrast, is allowed some spectacular reactions involving a staircase; her subsequent soliloquy of surrender is magic, a bold spirit made shy. Carlson's defiance of his former friends is an equivalent turning point for him; and in the play's home stretches both actors, alternately needling and nuzzling one another, are superb. Their union seems, as it should, like the happiest match in Shakespeare.

There's a 19th-century Brazilian setting (designed, naturally, by Santo Loquasto) that doesn't detract much, but doesn't add much either. The early scenes look and feel cluttered.

Newton writes at length in the program about the appropriateness of the period's politics, but really the causes of this war could hardly matter less; it's over before the play starts, and the only character who alludes to it later is the malcontent Don John (Gareth Potter, nicely neurotic), who's motivated solely by personal spite. The other males are allowed more complexity than usual. Juan Chioran's Don Pedro is especially distinguished, a lonely prince nursing a secret longing for women in general and, it seems, Beatrice in particular. Tyrone Savage makes a passionate case for the usually irredeemable Claudio, whose self-righteous cruelty at the nuptials is presented as the triumph of inexperience over hope. It isn't just Hero's betrothed who disowns her; her father Leonato joins in too, at least initially. James Blendick, affably witty in prose, makes a very heavy meal of his anger in verse, but this at least enables Bethany Jillard's Hero to convey how much his rejection adds to her humiliation. It also cues Timothy D. Stickney, as the good angel Friar Francis, to give his best Stratford performance to date. The constabulary scenes are performed with a confounding lack of inspiration; even the minor villains (Michael Blake and Victor Ertmannis), having started out as interesting sketches, remain merely sketchy. These scenes are introduced by what sounded to me like Jobim's “The Waters of March”, but Jonathan Monro's musical score otherwise stays attractively within the chosen period.