Bella Vista Farm, December 21
7/10
Megan O’Connell’s Beatrice starts to win us from the moment she appears, when director Samantha Young has her kill a snake with a spade (the Sport for Jove production being set in 1890s Australia, cued by the gracious farmhouse adjoining the outdoor stage). O’Connell proceeds to fill almost to the brim one of Shakespeare’s great characters, and without a winning Beatrice, Much Ado About Nothing is as hollow as its title.
The second ingredient the play demands is a fizzing chemistry between Beatrice and Benedick, and Jay James-Moody provides his share, while making Benedick more eccentric than usual. This chemistry does not imply an even match, however. Among most of Shakespeare’s lovers – Juliet and Romeo, Cleopatra and Antony, Lady Macbeth and Macbeth – the female is the sharper knife, and Beatrice is no exception: Benedick’s essentially her toy.
The bar for this chemistry is set precipitously high, having seen Anna Volska and Peter Carroll’s unforgettable vibrancy in Nimrod Theatre’s 1975 production at what is now Belvoir (far ahead of Kenneth Branagh and even Emma Thompson in Branagh’s film). With the play being Beatrice’s to win or lose, O’Connell’s challenge is that her wit must be brisk, and yet if it races ahead of our ears, we lose both the sense and the comedy. Happily, her instincts for pacing are sound, and so we delight in her for the laughs she provides, for her vivacity and for being the completest soul on stage.
If we don’t enjoy Beatrice and Benedick’s bantering antithesis of wooing, we’re left with subplots as flimsy as tissue paper, given the anodyne characters of Hero and Claudio in the second-layer love interest. Ellen Coote and Toby Blome strive to make more of them than Shakespeare wrote, and acquit themselves well enough so we almost care about their fates.
The strongest performance besides O’Connell’s is Mandela Mathia’s as Don Pedro and the Friar. Mathia has the presence of a ruler, the instincts of a comedian and a sonorous voice to outstrip the rest in dealing with the vagaries of outdoor theatre.
James-Moody’s quirky Benedick is matched by an even quirkier Don John, Don Pedro’s evil brother, played, in one of several examples of cross-gender casting, by Ziggy Resnick as more of a pantomime villain that usual, which largely works, because John’s motivations for his skulduggery always seemed rather specious, anyway.
Hero’s father, Leonato, now her mother, is played by Leilani Loau, who also doubles Dogberry, the idiotic copper who stumbles upon John’s plot, and miraculously saves the day. Loau needs to act less on the surface and more from within to climb closer to the level of O’Connell and Mathia.
Ultimately, Much Ado, as beloved as it is in the canon, cannot approach the stature of Twelfth Night or As You Like It among the Shakespeare comedies without a truly dazzling pair of leads. Yet, it, too, has a darker side, like a village, that even on the sunniest of days, feels the shadow of the gallows on the hill above. Young chooses to expunge much of the darkness, compounding the comedy (sometimes at the expense of the wit) by making it as broad as possible, with her farce-like staging and with the doubling of roles. Mathia, for instance, must swap from the Friar to Don Pedro before our eyes, when the latter is called in the wedding scene. But her emphasis on frivolity is generally to amusing effect.
Leura Everglades: January 4-19.