Good evening. It's Thursday, the 10th of March 2020.
I'm Ruth Moore, and this is a torch show conversation coming to you from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford upon Avon.
We're here for tonight's performance of one of Shakespeare's best loved comedies, Much Ado About Nothing,
directed by Rory Alexander Rise Much Ado Stars A King Henry as Beatrice and
Luke Wilson as Benedick with set design by Jemima Robinson Costume Design by
Melissa Simon Hartman and an original score by Femi Tambo by the programme
promises us a futuristic world where two very different couples fall in love.
The who is really pulling the strings with dastardly plots, hilarious slapstick and some of Shakespeare's wittiest dialogue.
This story of matchmaking and manipulation is the perfect way to celebrate the joy of live theatre.
After the show, we'll be joined by Professor Judith Buchanan, master of St Peter's College,
and Professor Emma Smith, professor of Shakespeare Studies Oxford University.
Judith and Emma will be sharing their reflections on the production and on the return of Shakespeare to the esteemed.
So we were at the interval of the RC Much Ado.
And yeah, we've got to the bit where Claudio has just seen the terrible betrayal at the at the window
which we of the balcony which we did actually see although that's not in the in the play.
What do you think, Judith? Well, we saw a little bit of the saucy trick.
We did, didn't we? We did. I am really enjoying it.
I am. The design is extraordinary.
It's a sort of futuristic vision, although it's a slightly sort of nostalgic sense of the future, it seems to me.
And there's a lot of festive bonny energy.
I am guessing a lot of the sense of mirth.
And it's been Almer so far.
So I'm interested to see how they're going to contain that and perhaps be more, hey, non-union, even signs of work at the moment.
So I'm not sure where they're going to take that or how they're going to bring that down.
But there's been a lot of beauty, a lot of gold, a lot of fizz, a lot of energy so far.
Have you found it? It's not so interesting hearing you say that.
I'm not enjoying it. And that's quite unlike me.
And some think, why am I not enjoying it? I think the set is in the way.
So I think we've just seen those two amazing comic scenes where first Benedick and then Beatrice are tricked in,
you know, with these kind of hopeless hiding places and that, you know, it's all been put on for their benefit.
And I thought they were both really clumsily blocked, particularly Benedict's actually where the boy who is part of the scene is now.
He's going to go and get a book which was kind of in the way I didn't I couldn't see Benedict's kind of reaction.
I couldn't get the reaction shots. I thought that was an example of the way that the set is a law in itself.
I mean, it's not actually helping.
I felt a bit with that wonderful fountain they brought on was a big piece of kit, very little used for the effort of it.
And it feels to me slow. And it's slow because of course, the music part of this is some set piece dancing.
Yeah. Wes has brought some ice cream. That's fantastic.
Thank you. Everything will be everything will be improved by that.
I think I'm really enjoying the music so that I mean,
I agree I agree with you that some of the blocking does feel a little bit impediment free or that it's sort of impeding a sense of the fluency.
But when the fluency is allowed to happen and the music releases some of that food,
I think I think the cast is much more comfortable in the music, I think actually than actually than in the dialogue maybe.
I agree. And when I first saw the some of the costumes, I did feel that they could be somewhat in the way.
They're very big kind of cartoonish proportions.
Yeah, some of them amazing pictures only. That's weird, kind of weird superheroes.
I mean, it was a superhero entrance, a super superhero entrance for Don Pedro.
And she is in this production.
And Claudio and Benedict, they were given a glorious entrance as they descended at speed from the gods, kind of waving their superhero capes.
Yeah, absolutely. And there was a kind of sense of we're back, we've been at war and now let the loving became.
What's that? Was this? That's right. What do you think about having done, Pedro?
Because one of the things.
I mean, one kind of really obvious thing to say about the play and the whole reason attempts to say it is to not say obvious things about the play.
But one obvious thing about the plays is a kind of gender war, isn't it?
The women's world in the men's world is actually quite different and there is a toxic component to that.
Having one thing about having Don Pedro as this prominent sort of go between.
Yes. I mean, they they played that quite nicely at the moment, at which Don Pedro but now Don Pedro offers him slash herself in jest, in seriousness.
We don't know to Beatrice and but but because it was now a woman offering herself to a woman, that was a real delicacy,
I thought, in how Beatrice responded to that, which was I respect the offer and I respect the possibility of that.
But that's not my thing. I think that's I do not that's not my direction.
Yeah, that's interesting. And it gave quite an interesting spin, didn't it, to them saying.
I mean, in the 21st century, a woman. This is a kind of Sondheim on a story, in a way.
You know, the woman who says, I just don't want to be married. I just don't want to be married.
I mean, there in Shakespeare, there is only. Well, you will be married, sweetheart.
You just have met the right man.
There are other narratives that that are available to us and that were sort of available to the production for a moment, which which I thought was.
Well, yeah, it was well done.
But I agree with you about we really need to feel that that kind of collective male energy is nervous of the female world.
And the collective male energy has been compromised in this production by having a woman at the centre of it.
So when, when Benedick is is saying, I guess I respect women, you know, one gave birth to me, etc., etc., but I will never trust a woman.
Yes, it is a slightly odd audience for that because he's saying that to a woman in this production,
but that that sense of kind of collective anxiety about what it might do to them individually and what it might do to them
collectively and their sort of bonds of brotherhood to now have come back from the wars and to be exposed to this world,
which is dominated by clever, fast talking, strong minded women.
I'm still feeling a little bit of that. I like the kind of martial, bellicose energy of the beginning.
I felt like that was fun and had a sense of its own sort of impish, self-conscious ness as well.
I am I am anxious about how they are going to tonally change that in the second half.
But I am waiting to be delighted and surprised about how they can find a slightly darker tone about the things that we know are coming.
That's fantastic.
I'm really pleased we actually just talked about it in the interview because I think I will probably enjoy I can see a lot of what you've said.
I actually think I might enjoy it. Having thought about those things, I do think that project of the three gendering characters,
which has a really important political energy about the theatre industry and about the kinds of stories we tell, particularly about classic plays.
I think sometimes it's likely that Shakespeare's own gender politics offer the whole a bit,
and I think that might be happening might be happening here.
And I hear your cautiousness about the sex. So it makes for spectacular photos.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's an awesome experience to be in the presence of it.
But there is a certain amount of stepping around it needed and it doesn't offer that kind of cover spaces and hiding places that this scene demands,
but that that's asking for our collusion. And I'm a theatre audience that is happy to collude.
Yeah. In a completely in a nice of work with a wheelbarrow.
Yeah, yeah. No, I'm, I'm, I'm about to. Okay.
So the second part I think is going to be yeah, I mean that and I'm glad that you sort of set up.
How are they going to turn that? How they're going to turn the temperature?
Yeah, well, let's see. We've been cool back and finish your ice cream, Emma.
So we're back in Oxford. JUDITH It's been a couple of days since we saw Much Ado About Nothing Wolf.
Well, what rests in your mind about it now? What? What do you think when I say that?
I remember design. Yeah. And I remember an atmosphere of some.
Some really stand out performances. I remember.
So we start by talking about design. Yes. It was such a design led production in some ways that it was very ideas heavy in relation to design.
And the the impact of design was big.
Hmm. Yeah. And when we, when we were talking about it in Stratford, I was, I mean,
doesn't this these sort of metal shapes that were the kind of classical garden that we tend to see in the overhearing scenes?
We tend to see some topiary, don't we, and some people behind the don't think too much of that.
And I realised, I mean having thought about it,
I thought that was a rather brilliantly striking part realist, part expressionist, kind of a kind of scene.
And, and I think that was probably something about the design more generally that
in some ways it was a very lavish set of stuff in the world of that machina.
But in other ways it was a lot of kind of slightly dream objects planted on the stage.
And I think that was more interesting and smarter than than mine.
It's great to have the chance to rethink, isn't it? I think if we'd done this immediately after the production, which we didn't do,
partly because it went on so long, I would have been and I've had a bit more time to think.
I think I agree with that.
So that the the futuristic vision of the set and design generally also necessarily invited us into a collusive relationship we had.
It was a bit Oberon. I am invisible now.
We needed to, but we needed to collaborate with the onstage actors to believe that they were invisible at those moments,
despite the fact that their efforts to self hide were patently insufficient actually.
To be hidden. So. So that a lot of some of the futuristic things had odd moments so that there
was a I thought the overall design was rather beautiful and rather striking.
And I remember it as a series of quite impressive stills and that that's both about set,
but also about those lavish kind of carnivalesque o-t costumes, which were witty in their extravagance with enormous wigs and enormous headpieces,
and a huge number of costume changes, a lot of gold, a lot of shine,
a lot of sort of almost kind of comic book kitsch in some of the kind of scale of those things.
But there were also odd things which I which clearly had some significant thinking behind them, which I didn't know how to place.
So when the men turn up with their swashbuckling glory coming back from the wars, they unload that treasure.
And that treasure is a chest of glowing orbs, and the glowing orbs then reappear.
It's sort of significant moments as if they've got some sort of ceremonial weight and that I,
I don't know what sort of meaning to invest in those, although clearly they're designed to mean something.
So they appear at the wedding. That isn't the wedding that might have been the wedding that nearly is the wedding that dissolves into violence.
And then they have to retreat quickly because that ceremonial moment has been so dramatically disrupted.
And the other moments when I thought the sort of futuristic vision this is is quite interesting
but and it's quite ideas heavy but some of those ideas are not fully translating I.
Them dog and crew working with that very old fashioned blackboard which has been hung with fairy lights.
I started by thinking, oh my goodness, this is a this is the most compromised futuristic vision you could possibly have working with a blackboard.
And then I thought, actually, technical and technological revolutions quite often do leave people behind, and that, if you will,
feeling left behind and you wanted to use a blackboard, you might turn it with lights in order to make it look a little bit more techno.
But that would have taken more, had the technological pizzazz of the rest of the production around it, had more traction.
So there were little kind of gestures in that direction when, you know,
when the letter arrives at the very beginning, it's on some quite fancy little tablet.
And then in fact, notes are taken on a fancy little shiny tablet in the in the crazy trial scene.
So I the futuristic vision was both kind of beguiling and perplexing.
I completely agree. But I suppose what I think that that has given to the play,
which is often a play we think of as not really needing a kind of interpretive
frame because it is psychologically plausible in ways that we recognise.
So we think. Okay. This is just two people who were obviously made for each other.
But can't you know that to hurt or to, you know, whatever is stopping them getting together and that's sort of all we need.
It doesn't need it's not a not almost as if it's not an ideas play.
It's a it's a human nature play. And so I suppose I think it was a really very stimulating, brave, brave.
Is that what you always say when it didn't work? And I don't quite mean that, but perhaps a little element of that.
But to turn it into an ideas play, which is in a different world from ours,
where there are some points of recognition that sometimes psychological, but there are lots of alienation as well.
And I think that was a good thing to do with Much Ado,
which can seem a bit too easy or a bit too straightforwardly layered onto our and onto our own world.
But it is a very human play, isn't it? I mean that the rhetorical flourishes are always embedded in the sense of the psychology of did you believe it?
Did you believe that the sort of human ness of those couples and.
Well, I suppose if I was going to a production of Much Ado and I didn't yet know what to expect,
one of the things I would be asking myself is how are they going to balance up the mirth and the matter?
How are they going to temper the hanging on in on a with signs of woe?
And the play has some kind of balance between those two things, although it's also generically as a comedy,
it also feels like a sort of rehearsal for something that engages much more with the sons of woe later in late plays.
When we get to Winter's Tale about what it means to be a woman who has been
wrongly accused of chastity and what kind of pain that can unleash in the world.
So it allows for a little bit of a sort of gestural encounter with that pain.
But but it also resolves it almost uncomfortably fast in a way.
That Winter's Tale, of course, allows itself to stay in that place of pain for 16 years.
And so I but I do I do think that there was a sort of phase and a buzz and a crackle of of human engagement.
And I particularly, I have to say in Beatrice, in a kid, Henry's Beatrice was this dynamo of sassiness,
of feisty sexiness and of winning in all of those rhetorical tussles and fun.
There was a lot of fun, I think I said at the interval that I was interested to see how they were going to still act,
how they were going to bring that into some kind of darker tonality which is waiting in the second half.
I don't know. What did you feel about the the tone or the measure or the pain of the second half?
I. Yeah.
I mean, I do think that the Beatrice Benedick relationship, which is born out of in a bond in that moment of pain, isn't it?
I mean, they're completely inextricable. I did think that. Beatrice kill Claudia was a kind of wonderful, wonderful moment, was perfectly timed.
It's very quick. It was it was very vehement.
It was very okay. You know, we can't we can't go down this romantic line.
She's not you know, she's not having that. She hasn't changed completely.
I didn't want her to change, but one of the things the whole play made me realise was how violent the,
uh, the violence to Beatrice in the overhearing seen the violence done to her.
Her sense of herself that she hears from the others is, you know, foretells or foreshadows what's going to be done to hero and complicates a bit.
That's the sense that I suppose I've always returned to, which is that this is a play about.
This is a sort of battle, a battle of the sexes kind of play.
If it's heading towards Winter's Tale, it's building off Taming of the Shrew.
But actually, the women are horrible to Beatrice, aren't they? And I was worried when she comes in, doesn't she?
And she's got a cold, or has she got the Benedict or whatever? She's a little bit she was a little bit wounded there.
It's a bit bruised was it. Wasn't she. And I realised I don't want Beatrice to be to stop being.
None of us do. We don't want her to stop being difficult and mouthy and witty.
And I think she managed. What I liked about the performance was I think we we managed to keep that even even in the that the relationship killed
Claudia a moment was played in a very different way from the from the way I think I've ever seen it played before.
It got a significant laugh. Yeah. And as you say, it,
it bit back very fast so that we're at the been the sort of foothills of the revelation of the of the of the extremity of their love for each other.
And it is. And he says, How can I prove my love for you? And she she fights back with kill Claudia with such speed that it looks like everything
before that point has been strategic in order to be able to manoeuvre him into that place.
And the audience laughed quite significantly at that point.
And that I think, I, I think I have only ever seen it before as a moment of deadly stillness,
where she then instructs him to do the thing that must be done,
knowing that it is a a an extraordinary burden to place upon him since his brother in arms
and his friend is the man who he's now being instructed to kill on the question of honour,
but to play it for laughs. I thought that was brave.
And it also in some ways slightly compromised the the weight of the love suit exchange.
What I really enjoyed just before that moment in the in the wedding scene,
the wedding that isn't and that if they'd had that taking place on a sort of plinth and a sort of golden double layer tent,
which was a bit like a wedding cake and a bit like an altar, and,
and they left hero on that plinth in a way that felt to me to be humanly implausible,
that if you if your friend was exposed in that way, you just want to get her into some small,
quieter, more sheltered space and that the production,
the blocking of the production left her in that very in that sort of exposed space for an uncomfortably long time.
She was almost like a sort of Lavinia figure, you know, bleeding whilst other things go on around her.
And that that irked quite a lot of her performatively.
And it was a slightly sort of petulant child like hero we got.
And so it was a it was a big ask of anybody to be that exposed for that long in a moment of that kind of pain.
But after the violence, such as it isn't such very temperate violence in this production,
it can one prepares to be incredibly shocked as as the misogyny is unleashed and that they didn't take it into the high key.
I had been expecting it, but nevertheless,
after the men have gone and believing her to have fainted and that she's going to be announced as dead subsequently.
And then Benedict makes his sort of statement of with.
There was a wonderful moment with Beatrice, who then is who is stilled as she listens with a kind of attentiveness and an acuity to Benedick,
breaking from those male bonds and deciding to stand with this committed community in pain, which is actually a sort of female dominated community.
And that he it feels. It felt to me in the production that it had been a sort of rhetorical game.
Even when have you called the Benedick? Even that was part of a game.
But he won her by being right minded in a very difficult human moment,
but in some way to an audience who are who are looking for the familiar and the foreign, you know, I know how this bit might play.
Yeah, I know the kind of patterns it's fallen into in the past. In what way are they going to, as it were, acquiesce to that?
And in what ways are they going to resist it and surprise me in terms of how they're doing it?
So they kill Claudio? Yeah. You know, it was a real surprise to me that that was played with quite that bite and speed
and for laughs and the exposure of hero on the plinth wedding cake altar thing.
Similarly, it was something I wouldn't have thought of doing.
And was it kind of resonated across plays, across productions as well?
Mm hmm. I wanted to go back to the in to the gender war thing, which in some ways does sit at the heart of the play.
And these men arrive with their sense of themselves as war heroes,
and they arrive into a world that is that they know their way around far as well, and that is anxiety provoking.
And they start making that sort of nervous joking almost as soon as they enter about cuckolding and the
kind of in meshing that when that might happen to one and how one might be rendered a fool quite easily.
And so when the dungeon plot takes off, it's, it's obscenely fast that their nervousness is converted into I,
I knew it and then misogyny and violence thereafter.
But of course, as we were talking about it at the interval,
that sense of how come the man with all of their competence but all of their nervousness is and all of their latent misogyny,
which only needs to be scratched very slightly in order to be unleashed.
But that male world has been interestingly compromised by casting Don Pedro as a woman and renamed Don Pedro,
and that she is then collusive in the male violence.
And we want her to break out from that and show some solidarity.
And in some ways she has been, you know, with the sort of the zeal of the new convert almost.
She's as as much in the misogynist camp as any of them.
And we are the more disappointed. But but her. I want to just to return to that because it was such an interesting and such a starkly brave
piece of casting that actually cut into some of the patterning of the play and unsettled it.
And the disruptions were sometimes useful and sometimes significantly disquieting.
And I think the difference between sort of cross casting and cross gendering in the moment,
in our Shakespeare moment, is actually is a very interesting one.
You know, are you saying actors play roles and those roles are discontinuous with their bodies in lots of different ways?
Or are you saying we change these characters so that they fit these different, different actors?
I mean, I was glad to have the props.
What my expectation of the play undone by this.
But I thought that the solidarity of the women in the in the marriage scene.
Was very uncomfortable and discomfort is a good thing isn't it.
In the theatre was was uncomfortable with the production kept quite quite rightly the the complete
lack of remorse that is shown by Don Pedro and Claudia when they meet Leonardo and and Antonio.
And it's only when they realise that in fact he wasn't unfaithful,
that there's any dent in their merriment and they're picking a fight with these these old men and, you know, strutting around.
And that's that made the Don Pedro a very, very uncomfortable, uncomfortable figure.
And I thought the production was a little bit unclear whether we were supposed to think Don Pedro.
Was a lesbian or sort of. Was inevitably so quiet.
There was something odd and oddly modern, wasn't there, about the sense that Don Patrick could have been wooing Hero for herself?
Nobody seemed to feel that that was any problem except that she should have been with Claudia.
That was quite an interesting way in which that recasting worked and it didn't work, I thought.
Yes. And then was consolidated in the sort of wooing of Beatrice.
And Beatrice is quite nimble.
Yes. Well, obviously, I sort of respect the offer, but I needed to know that's not my direction of travel.
Travel. That's not where my inclinations tend. Like.
I thought that little bit was actually quite dextrously handled.
But those men, the dump, Maja, Claudio, even Leonardo a little bit let off by the play and very much so by this production,
I thought by the sort of convenience of the Dom John character,
so that that sort of irredeemable villainy of Don John allows everybody to go, Oh, Don Joan, he's wicked, isn't he?
And he even he goes, Yes, I am. I'm a plain speaking villain.
And so this uncompromising villainy exists in the play in a way that allows everybody to dump all of that which is rotten on him.
Yeah. And for him to take it. Yeah. And that sort of implicitly exonerates a whole series of other things that have actually generated the,
the major scarring in the play and that so the men are allowed redemption,
they're allowed to get what they fundamentally want, which is to be hooked up with the right woman at the end and to feel morally,
morally clean about it in the process, because one can devise brave punishments for Don,
John and I in a sense of making the production feel wrapped up,
especially in the context of a production that had been so brilliantly dancey with some super funky music all the way through.
I thought that I will devise brave punishments for him at the end, but let's have a dance first,
and that the dance would be a real a real moment of healing, and that they would a indulgence.
And it was very truncated. It was very truncated.
And I didn't feel that enough. I wasn't given enough time to feel the openness of the ending.
So there were the troubling resonances were still very much present and that there wasn't enough dancing to banish it at the end.
And maybe that's a good thing, because actually banishing it is a slightly false ending.
In some ways it's recognising that we haven't solved things, we haven't cured things.
But in the context, in the context of a production that had gone so big on such brilliant dancing,
I kind of craved a little bit more than we were offered there.
And that, you know, it's a play that refuses to redeem Don John because it kind of wants presumably us to feel that we can reconcile,
reconcile ourselves to it, to a decent ending for the other men, despite what's been released into into this world.
But, you know, as you like it, which is the next year, isn't it? It's less than a year later as you like.
It has a sort of jokey ending which Duke Frederic is converted at the end, allows itself the rhetoric of we will we will redeem villainy.
No, there is no villainy that is irredeemable.
But Shakespeare doesn't allow himself that with Don John, presumably in order to allow Claudio to get his girl.
Yeah. The play bent over backwards, doesn't it, to make that okay.
And that's so interesting given what you started by saying about how setting up those later plays.
I mean, Shakespeare's not satisfied with this version of it, you say, because keep scratching away at this scenario.
Yeah, we've had to go in Merry Wives of Windsor, I guess.
Have we already. Probably. We're going to head on to seeing it again.
Yes. And it does feel like a a playwright who enjoys the generic spending of rich material.
Yeah. So get going. Give me a story. I write the story of this time I'll take.
The woman has been wrongly accused of sexual infidelity. I'll show it.
You with a comic spin? Much, too. Here we go. Yeah. All right.
Same story. Woman wrongly accused of sexual infidelity.
I'll show you the tragic spin. Othello.
Yeah. And then she is Perth. And that. Let me reflect on much ado.
Let me reflect on Othello. Neither of them is quite satisfying.
I would like to believe the could be a way back, but the way back that I found within those kind of comic generic structures was, was too easy.
I need to make it harder and I need to make I need to make the ending more
fractured and more pained than I was able to do within those comic structures.
Let's go to them next. Okay. I'll see you there, Anna.