"Much Ado About Nothing". Creation Theatre

This review was written for Daily Information, and appears on their website.

Is there anything more British than sitting in a municipal park on a summer’s evening, getting soaked to the skin watching Shakespeare? There’s a magic to it. Sure, balmy sunsets with whispering zephyrs are nice in their way. But listening to Beatrice and Benedick harangue each other while the water pools in the folds of your kagoule and the diverted freight trains chunder past every fifteen minutes is so quintessentially part of the English summer that I think I actually prefer it. You get your tan from standing in the English rain. And by the end there’s a sense of community in the audience, almost a Blitz mentality, that means we all go away having shared a taste of Shakespeare that hasn’t changed for four hundred years.

Much Ado About Nothing contains a line that blatantly embraces the pitfalls of outdoor performances (as of course all the earliest productions would have been). Borachio says to his partner Conrade, ‘Stand thee close, then, under this pent-house, for it drizzles rain’. Although cut from this particular production, it instantly connects every outdoor Shakespeare today with the first performances back in 1599.

Creation Theatre’s energetic production is set in the 1980s. The idea was to convey a sense of wafer-thin yuppie optimism against a backdrop of seething unrest. I can’t honestly say all of that comes through, but it does provide a thumping soundtrack of 80s bangers from Like a Virgin (suitable for Claudio’s accusation against Hero) to Sweet Dreams Are Made of This when everything is resolved at the end. Other 80s icons include an Elvis impersonator as the wedding friar, a mobile phone the size of a Clark’s shoebox, and non-stop New Romantic costumes from the military characters dressed like Adam Ant to the women channelling Toyah Wilcox.

It all makes for a fresh, fun and frantic production that everyone can enjoy. Despite the rain tonight, not a single audience member left. There were children of four gazing open-mouthed and bursting into uncontrollable giggles as Benedick got a face-full of ice-cream while hiding in a bin, and there were seasoned theatre-goers in their seventies chuckling along as their glasses of Prosecco gradually changed into glasses of fresh rainwater.

This isn’t a delicate or nuanced Much Ado About Nothing. The cast do have to battle a somewhat noisy location, so clarity is paramount. Also, the entire show is performed by just six people. Two of them play Beatrice and Benedick throughout, and the other four share twelve more parts amongst them. So the pure technical feat is in itself quite a coup de theatre. As well as acting up to four different characters each, the cast manage to make them all completely distinct, and that virtuosity is one of the greatest joys of this production. At times the costume changes are so fast that you don’t even realise you’re seeing the same actor.

In the middle of all this action-packed activity, the one thing that does suffer is the relationship between Beatrice and Benedick. While they run rings of mockery around each other, there is – or should be – an irrepressible attraction between them that is clear to everyone else, both audience and dramatis personae. That is lacking in this production. While it’s easy to see how they annoy each other, it’s harder to pick up the deep desire. This is a shame. As a couple, Beatrice and Benedick are arguably Shakespeare’s greatest lovers: their advancing years mean that they have outgrown the giddy infatuations of star-crossed teenagers like Romeo and Juliet; they aren’t stunned with love at first sight like Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It; and they are a lot more sensible than that other pair of Shakespearean mature lovers, Antony and Cleopatra, who seem more concerned about themselves than they are about each other. Beatrice and Benedick have been around the block. They’ve even been out with each other before. They try to deny it but the fact is they can’t stop thinking about each other. Beatrice’s first line in the play is a question about whether Benedick is in the visiting party, and Benedick, in one of my favourite scenes, goes on and on to Don Pedro about how unreasonable Beatrice is, at one point declaring ‘I would not marry her!’ – when no one has even suggested that he should. Their ultimate confession of true adoration is in the two pieces of paper containing scribbled lines of affection, purloined by their friends at the end of the play. All the audience sees is them reading the papers quietly to themselves, not out loud. What a wonderfully subtle and fitting way to have these most unromantic but deeply bonded people acknowledge their feelings. Sadly, the chemistry just didn’t seem to be there between Emily Woodward and Anna Tolputt.

It's a rough-and-ready production, veering from panto-style audience participation with Dogberry and Verges to moments of ethereal beauty like a slow-motion dance with veils and umbrellas. If you’ve never seen Much Ado About Nothing before, it’s the ideal introduction. If what you seek is true love, then, like many before you, you may fail to find it in the South Oxford Adventure Playground.