Much Ado About Nothing
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

Obviously the prospect of Donald Sinden and Judi Dench in Much Ado About Nothing (Stratford) was enticing, but it also prompted misgivings. 

Miss Dench, we knew, would be funny and enchanting, but with so much going for her, and virtually nothing going against her, it was difficult to imagine her as a plausible spinster. For this is what Beatrice is: not a bachelor girl, which would imply choice, but a woman who, both being of and living in a marriageable age see her contemporaries and juniors go to the world’s end, accompanied by her own cry of ‘Heigh ho for a husband.’

Miss Dench, is not, on the face of her, a plausible occupant of any shelf anywhere. Stratford’s last two Beatrices were, in different ways, alarming; they frightened off all but the exceptional man. In a world of Claudios they needed the Benedick. But Miss Dench is not a scarer; you could imagine her rejecting suitors, but never failing to attract them. 

She copes unimaginably well. Her strategy is, at first, to damp herself down; her dress is drab and her wit sour rather than sparkling. Her gibes at Benedick are meant to hurt, not to entertain; their first encounter is played, unusually, without spectators. It yields intensity but not much laughter, and I began to fear that we would see another comedy crucified. 

Relief and enlightenment came on a couple of lines, rather obscure and generally ignored, which hint at a previous, scarring involvement between the two protagonists. In John Barton’s production, Miss Dench pulls this suggestion to the front of the play. We see what is gnawing her, sympathise and relax. When she melts, the effect is breathtaking. Miss Dench is always inspiring sentences like that, but her means for doing so seem simple enough; she merely injects into a hush a few lines denoting surrender and spoken with an unquestioning directness that inspires a kindred feeling in the audience. But I wish I knew how she created a hush in the first place; can there be more to it than concentration? I know, though, that while her spark and bubble make her a fine comic actress, it is these moments that silently proclaim her great. 

We weep for happiness at Beatrice’s conversation, having already laughed at Benedick’s, which is enormously coy. Mr. Barton has set the play in an outpost of British Raj; there are gains and losses, but one of the gains is a dinner going furiously struck by Miss Dench, when dispatched to summon Mr. Sinden for tiffin. Benedick’s desperate efforts to find signs of love in her (‘There’s a double meaning in that’) have never in my experience been more hilarious. 

His new passion is still, at this stage, a joke. It does not deepen until the church scene. Beatrice, enraged at Claudio’s rejection of her cousin, falls—an inspirational touch—to sweeping up confetti; she must, instinctively, do something. Benedick has to fight hard to reclaim her; has in fact to declare his love to her unyielding back; and his agreement to challenge Claudio is the natural development. He has been moved and stung into seriousness, and he grows. Mr. Sinden conveys all these transformations beautifully.  

With the happy ending secure, the two of them can afford to play a bit; in their mockery they almost return to first base. But this time it is a game, and if Benedick remains, in his airy way, something of a male chauvinist pig, he is obviously ripe—in the imagery of this production—for sticking. One mark of Miss Dench’s supremacy in comedy is my invariable delight at seeing her get her man. Which, considering my feelings in the matter, is generous of me. The theatre must be an ennobling place. 

Mr. Barton’s production is already fine and will probably be finer. The stage is this with relateonships: full of detail but not submerged in it. Some characters are dull, but others stand out as seldom before: the waiting women, for instance, with Margaret (Eliza Ward), the witty, flirtatious chambermaid, and Ursula (Marilyn Taylerson), a genteel lady’s companion with an earnest enthusiasm for pleasures and plotting. Don John (Ian McDiarmid) is earnest too, and wholly original: curly-haired and studious, obviously sent out to the Army against his will and bitterly representing it. Claudio (Richard Durden) is conventional but none the worse for it, convention being the key of his character. 

In some ways the production is a companion to Mr. Barton’s Othello, also set in an outpost of the Empire; in others—notably its awareness that in Much Ado people are always awaiting, then attending, or recovering from a party—it resembles Franco Zeffirelli’s National Theatre version. But it has wit and consistency of its own. (I have actually seen one Much Ado that wasn’t set in the nineteenth century; it was something of a revelation.) The chosen medium has the drawback of making marriage seem the ‘exception rather than the rule’, which strikes at the play’s ethos and diminishes Don Pedro’s isolation at the end. I found myself, too, wondering precisely where on this subcontinent place names like Aragon and Messina might be found.  

The lower orders are all loyal natives, which lends strange conviction to John Woodvine’s Dogberry, both in his struggles with the English language and his pride in it. His friend Verges is a Briton, which seems inconsistent, but maybe the actor had trouble with the accent. Plainly, the National’s Phaedra has established a new route for the classics; they must all be shipped off to India at least once, so that they may learn what it means to be British.