I’ve seen Much Ado About Nothing done in so many different ways over the years: transported to the 60s, the 80s, the 20s; set in a luxury hotel, a European football stadium, an Indian palace, a girls’ boarding school, and a broken train in the Mexican revolution. I’ve even, if you can believe this, seen it set in Messina in the 1590s. No matter how far-fetched the concept, the play is always (well, nearly always) enriched, showing a new side of itself, like a revolving vase.
But I’ve never seen it done like this. Peter Sutton has linked Shakespeare’s comedy of masked balls, visiting amorous army officers, and bright young women, to its most natural counterpart of all: Jane Austen. Not only is it a connection that was hiding in plain sight, it’s also a fitting way to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth.
So, unusually for a JCSP (Jesus College Shakespeare Project) production, this Much Ado has a big costume budget, with Don Pedro and his merry men in the smart red jackets and white pipeclay trousers of Georgian infantrymen, and Beatrice, Hero and their whispering womenfolk engaged on embroidery, while wearing the Regency empire line dresses we’ve come to associate with Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse. It looks gorgeous.
But this isn’t an in-your-face explosion of directorial caprice. It’s a sympathetic, intelligent, almost gentle recognition of partnership between possibly the two greatest writers the UK has produced. Even the title, Much Ado..... About Nothing, echoes Austen’s penchant for focusing on the trivialities that hold sway over our lives. And Sutton wasn’t going to miss out on the foundational Austen moment of our times either. So, as an early Easter egg for those whose memories go back to 1995, this Benedick (Ben Gilchrist channelling Colin Firth) strips to his underwear and jumps, not Darcy-like into a lake, but clown-like into a bath of cold water.
The Regency apparel, and the slightly poseurish physicality it inevitably engenders, give this production a poised, stately atmosphere. The music that accompanies it is all 18th-century, and as refined as one of Lady Catherine de Bourgh’s soirees. (There’s even one piece by Jane Austen herself.) While it’s still unmistakeably a comedy, it’s characterised by restraint, rather than the sort of bawdy hullabaloo you might normally associate with Elizabethan romps.
Of course Jane Austen is a great humourist. And Much Ado is a great comedy. So it is a little surprising that when you put the two together you don’t get comedy squared but halved. My suspicion is that they slightly cancel each other out. A young lady in a Jane Austen novel would never say, ‘I would he had boarded me!’ so hearing Beatrice pronounce that while wielding her latest crochet pattern is, while still funny, also a little unsettling.
But this, I think, is the real insight of Sutton’s staging. Following Austen’s genteel prompt, he has resisted the temptation to play Much Ado just for laughs. Instead, he has played it for truth. When Benedick, after eavesdropping over his friends (who are deliberately misleading him) turns to the audience and says, ‘This can be no trick’, it’s normally a comic banger. Here, while amused at his mistake, we’re also sympathetic. We hear the reasoning. And later, when Beatrice (a gleefully rambunctious Rowan Brown) arrives to fetch him in with the words, ‘Against my will I am sent to bid you come in to dinner’ – another dependable woof – the polite frustration she feels is as palpable as the humour of the situation. Even Don John (Arthur Bellamy), normally – and by his own confession – a ‘plain-dealing villain’, is here softly-spoken and bordering on reasonable. And he’s got a point: he has been defeated by his brother in battle, and then been forced to behave like a jolly member of the family. In his position, anyone would be peeved.
In fact, some of the strongest, and most original, decisions in this production have nothing to do with comedy at all: Margaret (Elouise Wills) quietly leaving the wedding when she realises the cruel stratagem she’s been dragged into, and later left alone on stage weeping with guilt, bring a human edge to the trickery. And when Leonato (Peregrine Neger) suddenly allows his fatherly affection to overflow his misplaced disgust, and embraces Hero after wishing her dead, an aura of redemption glows around the play, more like The Winter’s Tale than The Comedy of Errors.
So it’s a quiet Much Ado. Perhaps A Soupcon of Ado. And while this approach is refreshingly pure and thoughtful, it is possible that on the night I saw it, it simply wasn’t being as funny as usual. Comedies, or rather, audiences, can do that. Sometimes they just don’t fire up, like a car that refuses to start. Audiences are recalcitrant beasts, and they can be put off by the smallest thing: one slightly inaudible line, a delayed start, or simply something in that particular group of people that makes them quiet. Last night they were deeply attentive, but not rolling in the aisles.
It may be that other performances have been riotous. But for me, the genuine human pain underscoring the twists and turns of this production made it more engrossing than the usual laughter-fest. The illusion of Hero’s death was so convincing that both the characters in the play and the audience seemed to forget temporarily that it’s just a ruse. We felt the sorrow of her loss, and the relief of her return. And the fact that Hero was played by Emily Polhill, who took the role of Juliet in last year’s Romeo and Juliet, only made her reawakening from death all the more redemptive. This was how it was supposed to work out for Juliet in Friar Lawrence’s abortive plan. In Much Ado, Friar Francis has the same idea, and this time, magically, Juliet/Hero lives. It’s an example of the sort of art-through-continuity that only the JCSP can achieve, by performing Shakespeare’s plays in order of composition, with a regular, rolling cast of actors.
A word should also be spared for Peter Sutton’s remarkable gift for editing. Every one of his Shakespeare productions runs at about an hour and forty-five minutes, and yet, even if you’re familiar with the text, it’s hard to see what’s missing. Streamlined script, perfect diction, original but never outrageous interpretation. It’s a winning combination. And as the audience applauded at the end, the sight of Rowan Brown and Emily Polhill (Beatrice and Hero) hugging each other, not in character, but as friends, summed up the guiding light of this production: not pride, not prejudice, not slapstick, not wordplay. Just honest emotion.