At Wales Theatre Company |
| Wales Actors Company- Much Ado About Nothing , on tour , July 16, 2004 |
| this review first appeared in The Western Mail The Wales Actors Company will have been on the road for twenty years next year and, understandably, still feel a tad put out that they get no proper public funding, still operate from a small back bedroom in Llanbradach and in somewhere like Carmarthen have to fork out nearly £500 of their own money before they’re allowed to perform. Since they say they attract audience figures very close to Clwyd Theatr Cymru’s, they may have a point – certainly they are a popular pull in all Wales’s crumbling castles and local venues and they launched their latest claim to recognition at Cwmaman and will be strutting their stuff, rain or shine, until the middle of August at Manorbier with one of Shakespeare’s blackest comedies WAC are certainly a cut above the usual summer-season ad-hoc bunch of touring players, with their productions informed by both an intelligence and a commitment to the importance of the actor. This Much Ado is never less than engaging and benefited enormously from a very sparky performance from Swansea’s Charlotte Rogers as the caustic, independent Beatrice. The heroine’s feisty anti-men attitude is sharpened by director Paul Garnault’s neat idea of setting the action in the 1960s, allowing Beatrice to represent the feminist movement of the time and at the same time to wear a very short mini-skirt – while the men are all rather foppish in a kind of smartish flower-power style, with a way-out hippy Watch and a spliff-smoking villain. All very entertaining, with some individual performances, although little of the celeb-flavoured spin given by the company’s publicity, which misleads us by suggesting that the story can be seen in the context of Hello-style obsession with trivial speculation – and that the real nasty in the plot, Don John, is a Max Clifford-style operator. No, that isn’t really there – and, more importantly, what’s also absent is any of the dark side of this story of misunderstanding and intrigue. What we have in the original, after all, apart from the Beatrice and Benedick sub-plot, is the tale of how a few men were willing to believe that a virtuous woman dear to them all could cheat on her lover the night before her wedding. Hero’s fiancé Claudio, friend Don Pedro (with Benedick, all soldiers returning from a war) and a character who in the original is her father Leonato but who, bizarrely, here is her mother Leonata (a gender-change that seems unnecessarily to rob the play’s anti-male indictment of its force) take at face value a malicious set-up designed to destroy everyone’s happiness - a familiar Shakespearean dig at patriarchal Elizabethan society missing from the WAC version, where the lads all seem pretty nice guys. Paul Garnault has edited and amended the play, presumably to make it more accessible, conflating characters as well as giving them sex-change operations, but he does also seem to have discarded much of the interest in what’s regarded as one of the Bard’s “problem” plays. That may make it more fun for an audience not necessarily looking for deep interpretation but it does seem to miss the point, too. And on a lighter note, Garnault’s programme notes (always far more erudite than we have a right to expect from an unfunded company allegedly dealing in entertainment rather than art) offer us a way in to the theme by suggesting that the “Nothing” of the title is a pun on “Noting”, since the characters are continually observing each other. I prefer the idea that it owes more to Elizabethan slang, where a lady’s no-thing is often the cause of much attention – so translating “Much Ado About Nothing” in modern parlance into “A Fuss about Fanny”. |
Reviewed by: David Adams |
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