Okay, so it's not really a DAILY double! And yes, I am falling shamefully behind in my duties to the blogosphere. Anyway, here goes.
Last Saturday (a whole week ago! -- bad, bad bad!!!) I was at Stratford for my fourth show of the season. Hard to believe I've racked up that many already! This was a Festival Theatre staging of Much Ado About Nothing, which is one of my favourite Shakespeare plays. It's either the second or third staging I've seen since meeting the play in 1994 through Kenneth Branagh's landmark film.
That film came into mind as a landmark because it exemplified a noteworthy change in Shakespeare performance. Before that film came out, it seemed to me that many Shakespeare performers declaimed the text so quickly that the play seemed like a race to the finish line, the words tumbling all over each other at top speed, and this made it hard sometimes to follow what was happening. In the movie, Branagh favoured a slower, more nuanced, more naturalistic style, which greatly clarified the occasional obscurities of the Bard's language. He also showed that at times it was possible to edit the text without doing great harm to the forward flow of the story -- indeed, at times, the cuts improved the flow.
This style has become more prominent of recent years in stage productions too, and this performance was no exception. I was looking forward to it, because it is directed by one of the great directors of our day, Christopher Newton, for so many years the Artistic Director of the Shaw Festival. And the production fulfilled my expectations in all ways -- except one.
The strengths: an elegant, curving staircase sweeps across the upstage area, providing a very flexible acting space, especially with the wide landings near the bottom and at the top. The action still flows freely around this, but also over it and up and down. And because the staircase faces towards the audience, it's a much more useful acting space than the back-angled steps of the original balcony on the stage. Costumes were perfectly attuned to the elegant environment. This was meant to be Brazil in the late 1800s, but there was nothing to my eye that looked particularly of that time and place. Maybe this is another way of saying that high-society Brazil was essentially a copy of Europe. The feeling of "tropics" was certainly there in the plants, but that could also have been Mediterranean, as the script states (Sicily).
The cast included some of the strongest players of the current Festival company, and all were in fine form: Deborah Hay and Ben Carlson striking sparks off each other as Beatrice and Benedick, Juan Chioran strong and firm as the Prince, and James Blendick splendidly emotive as Leonato. Gareth Potter as Don John was a surprise -- not the actor I would have predicted for that kind of role, but the underplayed menace he brought to the part worked beautifully.
The one disappointment was Richard Binsley in the key comic role of Dogberry. His performance seemed to be lifted straight out of the bad old days of express-train Shakespeare, and half his words were lost in the rushing blur of sound. A pity, because the humour of Dogberry is purely verbal humour, the ridiculous malapropisms creating all the laughs -- and he didn't get nearly as many as this character ought to draw.
But aside from that flaw, this was definitely a production to treasure for its many other excellences.
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