Much Ado About Nothing 2007

Jay Villiers and Lucy Black in Much Ado About Nothing (Photo: Graham Burke)

22nd March - 28th April 2007

Director's Note

  The thematic links between Othello and Much Ado – despite their wide difference in tone – are compelling:  each play turns on a misapprehension of sexual deceit, each of these malevolently inspired.  But whilst for a mighty tragedy one great linear plot is sufficient, for the lighter, more playful comedy Shakespeare deftly weaves in two.  While Don John works to destroy one love-match - by tricking Claudio into believing that his fiancée, Hero, is a whore - Don Pedro works to create a second, by tricking Benedick and Beatrice into believing that each is silently in love with the other.  Little is as it seems in this play – the masks, the hiding places, the truths misheard as falsehoods, the falsehoods misheard as truths, these are the currency of communication in Leonato’s house, and they find an apt mirror in Dogberry’s infectious malapropisms.  But amid all the chaos, we may well suspect that there lies one delightful psychological truth - that Don Pedro is not so much ‘creating’ a love-match, as revealing one that has been hidden from everyone, even from Beatrice and Benedick themselves.
  The ugly crisis in the first plot  – the extraordinary denunciation in the church – then becomes the catalyst of the resolution in the second.  Truth is provoked by the enormity of the Lie.  Pretension, self-absorption and brittle self-esteem give way, in the pressure of the moment, to a naked simplicity.
  We have chosen to set the play in the Sicily of the 1930s, a world with one foot in the conservative and Catholic world that Lorca explored so powerfully in neighbouring Spain – and the other in the freer world we know now.  As the dual plots approach their crisis, the older world claims first Claudio, Don Pedro, Hero and Leonato and then - in the famous ‘kill Claudio’ injunction - Beatrice and Benedick as well.  How far the final resolution can reverse that claim is the most lasting and intriguing question about the play.

Cast

Leonato John Walters
Messenger & Oatcake Byron Mondahl 
Beatrice Lucy Black  
Hero Siobhan McMillan 
Don Pedro Philip Buck 
Don John Paul Currier  
Claudio Oliver le Sueur 
Benedick Jay Villiers  
Antonio & Verges Paul Nicholson
Conrade Nicholas Gadd
Borachio Russell Bright
Balthasar & Seacoal Morgan Philpott
Margaret Elinor Lawless
Ursula Renu Brindle 
Dogberry Bill Wallis
Friar Francis Peter Townsend 
Sexton Christopher Hogben

Production

Director Andrew Hilton
Associate Director Dominic Power
Assistant Director Nadia Giscir
Set & Costume Designer Chris Gylee
Costume Supervisor Tomasin Cuthbert
Lighting Designer Paul Towson
Composer & Sound Designer Elizabeth Purnell 
Choreographer Jonathan Howell 
Production Photographer   Graham Burke

Production Manager  Tim Hughes   
Stage Manager Jayne Byrom
Deputy Stage Manager Eleanor Dixon
Assistant Stage Manager Adam Moore
Costume Maintenance Miri Birch
Costume Laundry Kim Winter
ASM on attachment Holly Foulds

Bill Wallis and Paul Nicholson by Graham Burke 


Reviews

The Guardian
Thursday March 29, 2007
* * * *
   Hot on the heels of the RSC's hugely enjoyable Much Ado set in 1950s Cuba comes another really cracking production, this time transposed to 1930s Sicily. Director Andrew Hilton is Shakespeare's plainest cook, but he allows himself and his cast plenty of fun, as well as more scenery than usual - a few tables, chairs and Chinese lanterns.
  Dance, as both courtship rite and symbol of sexy abandon, is the central metaphor in a production that plays out Shakespeare's battle of the sexes as a dance in which love, loss, love regained and love recognised are marked out with a mixture of quiet formality and giddiness.
  From the opening scenes, the behaviour of the quartet of would-be lovers is very different: Hero and Claudio's can't-take-their-eyes-off-each-other glances are in marked contrast with the way Benedick turns his back on Beatrice. Both couples have something to learn, but when Benedick and Beatrice join the merry dance of the human race in accepting love and each other with all their flaws, you have no doubt which couple will have the longer and happier marriage. As with dancing, it is all a matter of balance. 
  Much Ado is a play that requires its two leads to seduce the audience. Lucy Black and Jay Villiers do it magnificently. She looks like a neurotic librarian, he is paunchy, balding and unkempt, and yet, sparring with each other, they are sexy, funny, attractive and gloriously human in their insecurities. Some of the minor players are not quite so sharp as in previous seasons, but after eight unsubsidised years of first-class productions isn't it time the Arts Council realised it should be funding on the basis of merit, not geography? Lyn Gardner

The Sunday Times
April 8, 2007
* * *
   You can tell whether a director has fully grasped the subtlety of this play from Beatrice’s words to Benedick: “Kill Claudio!” If she gets a laugh, you’ve wrong-footed the play. Andrew Hilton’s production doesn’t get a laugh; Beatrice is in deadly earnest. Lucy Black first appears carrying an edition of Othello: she’s clearly in two minds about men and she plays Beatrice as a prickly woman, rather like a tetchy librarian. Falling in love is quite an event for her, and she fills it with doubt, pain and humour. One note: she rushes her lines, losing some of the poetry. Jay Villiers’s Benedick is the jovial club-man type: a man’s man who knows less about life and women than he thinks. I liked Siobhan McMillan’s eager, pretty Hero; and Bill Wallis’s Dogberry is a treat. John Peter

The Stage 
Monday 26 March 2007
   Few of the Bard’s works can be more suited to an updated setting than Much Ado. The theme of soldiers returning from war is, of course, universal, and Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory artistic director Andrew Hilton has opted for a thirties approach reminiscent of a Noel Coward comedy. Indeed, the flights of fancy between Beatrice and Benedick come surprisingly close to mirroring the clashes of wit between Amanda and Elyot in Private Lives.
  All is lightness and merriment and although this masks the fact that Beatrice and Benedick are really the only two wholly likeable characters on show, Hilton does not allow it to overwhelm the play’s darker side, exploring Sicily’s cruel and rigid social code. Also on the plus side, there are two wonderfully humorous performances from Lucy Black and Jay Villiers as the protagonists. The two scenes in which the plotters first sow the seeds of love are played with such delightful inventiveness that they are worth the ticket price alone.
  None of the other characters comes close to being as rounded, although Siobhan McMillan is a mischievous and dutiful Hero, Philip Buck more an conspirator than a nobleman as Don Pedro and Bill Wallis a splendidly puffed-up yet somehow innocent Dogberry. Jeremy Brien

The Morning Star
Wednesday 28 March 2007
   FOR the seasonal duo of plays for his Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory Company, Andrew Hilton has coupled his acclaimed production of Othello with what is often seen as Shakespeare's schizophrenic comedy.
  So often on the stage, there appear to be two conflicting modes of comedy at play. The romantic main plot, in which malignant plotting to destroy the happy union of young lovers is only foiled by the lucky interference of comic cops, is virtually always overshadowed by the so-called merry war of words between two nominally secondary characters, Beatrice and Benedick, significantly played in most productions by the lead actors. 
  Hilton has resolved this apparent broken-backed aspect of the play by presenting a coherent world, here 1930s Sicily, where characters inter-relate across class and gender with traditional familiarity. In this close community, the old regard the young with humorous warmth, having seen it all and lived it themselves before.
  Both Lucy Black's Beatrice and Jay Villiers’ Benedick, pushing a resigned middle age, reveal a pained awareness of the passing of youth behind their bouts of rapier wit as they contemplate the engaging puppy love of Siobhan McMillan's Hero and Oliver le Sueur’s Claudio.
  As always, Hilton's great strength lies in his semi-permanent ensemble. The test of this play comes in the crucial wedding scene, when Claudio is misled to believe that Hero is unfaithful and rejects her with a cruelty that can tip the action into melodrama.  Here, Beatrice's stark demand of Benedick to "kill Claudio" is delivered with a low-keyed helpless intensity that strips away all the hitherto surface gaiety.
  We recognise now their rooted mutual feelings, which hardly needed the well-intentioned trickery of their friends to trigger them.
  The comic identity of the play is subsequently retrieved by Bill Wallis' Constable Dogberry, no comic clown but a man whose mangled language reveals a life of frustrated ambitions and pretensions.
  Another winner for this attractive company. Gordon Parsons

The British Theatre Guide
  This is the second production of Andrew Hilton's SATTF season. In common with its predecessor, Othello, it frames a beautifully crafted central relationship. Beatrice, (Lucy Black) and Benedick (Jay Villiers) are playful and sparky. That they are so easily 'persuaded' to fall in love comes as little surprise: the signs are there from the start, albeit subtly worked into the sub-text. In Hilton's hands Villiers and Black combine a respect for the rhythm and poetry of the text with great comic instinct; the scenes in which they 'hide' played out superbly by both.
  At the start of the play, Lucy Black's Beatrice is self-reliant and assertive, and, above all, heartily protests against any need or desire for marriage, all delivered with her smoky, low-pitched and resonant voice.
  Villiers has a seductive, unkempt and dismissive quality. He has a charismatic stage presence and a fresh and effortless naturalism. He provides by far the funniest performance of the night, thanks as much to his pitch-perfect handling of the text as to his mastery of physical comedy.
  As the romance between Benedick and Beatrice grows, the relationship has an easy maturity about it, particularly evident in the "Kill Claudio" scene. It certainly stands apart from the youthfully impetuous love affair, played out between Hero (Siobhan McMillan) and Claudio (Oliver Le Sueur). McMillan is a demure, flirtatious Hero and Le Sueur driven by an earnest, consuming passion, every bit the Shakespearean romantic lead. But alongside the fleshed-out, grown-up love between Beatrice and Benedick, they seem lightweight.
  Paul Currier does well as Don John, and is a perfect foil to this light-hearted playfulness. He is a cool, dispassionate, and understated villain. He has the detachment of the privileged, the reserve of the aristocrat; utterly comfortable in the production's 1930s setting.
  This is a vibrant company, with several other noteworthy performances, especially Bill Wallis's Dogberry and Paul Nicholson's Verges. Though it lacks the tight ensemble work of Othello, it is an energised, entertaining production. Allison Vale   

 

Lucy Black and Jay Villiers by Graham Burke