Much Ado About Nothing

 A warm and dry evening lends itself perfectly to an evening at the Globe and this one didn’t disappoint.  This is a traditional version of the play that surely would have satisfied the purists but without being stuffy at all.  For the first half, the theatre was full of the lovely lightness and comedy of this classic enemies to lovers romcom.   Ekow Quartey was an engaging and sweet Benedict and Amanda Vitalie turned in a great comic performance as a fiery fury of a Beatrice.  The two secondary lovers were fairly insipid but that’s no fault of the actors;  I’ve rarely seen performances that manage to lift those characters into something more interesting.   The second half  has a fairly clunky change of pace and tone, and always feels like a screeching handbrake turn to near tragedy but, in an echo of Romeo and Juliet, the priest’s suggestion to play dead works out this time and so we get our happy ending. The bit that really grates though is the shocking misogynistic about turn from Leonato who switches from a doting, if slightly weak, father to a man who thinks his daughter’s death is a suitable punishment for her ‘dishonour’ and then back again.  And the less said about Claudio's about turn the better.  Always leaves a nasty taste that, and this version was no different.  On the comic side though,  Dogberry (Jonnie Broadbent) and Verges (Colm Gormley) did very well I thought to keep what can be a fairly painful skit actually pretty funny although I am not sure all of the tourists standing with me got all of the wordplay.    

The music and costume in this production was fantastic as were the Elizabethan dances.  And as is usual at this theatre the audience participation was kept pretty high, although I felt a little sorry for the blushing young man without a beard who was picked on a few times, and for the lady who held Dogberry’s staff for what felt like most of the second half.  

I was a groundling again because it's always my favourite place in this theatre - great for people watching as well as for the view of the stage.  And for some reason, this time I could actually see around the tall people who tend to congregate around the front.  Lots of tourists as usual, and I did see more than one little group leave after getting a half an hour taste of the ‘Shakespeare experience’ and I watched another couple in front of me in the ice cream and drinks queue decide to go back to their hotel and sleep because ‘we can look up what happens later’.  The loud and quite dull young man behind me was quite entertaining as he informed his partner that the globe is clearly subsidised and that the actors did it for no virtually no wages.  I have to say I am always impressed that they keep the tickets so low given that they haven’t traditionally had the subsidy of, for example, the NT further up the river.  And I'm sure that the tourist market has an awful lot to do with that, so I'm not going to complain!

This was a lovely evening out to one of the most accessible of Shakespeare’s plays (even if it goes a bit weird in the middle).  And even though it overran to just under 3 hours, I caught my train with one minute to spare - got my cardio in on that speedwalk to the station so a success all round.