RSC REVIEW: ***** (five stars) Cast on top of their game in splendid footie-themed Much Ado About Nothing
5 stars: Reviewer Steve Sutherland finds a cast on top of their game in a splendid footie-themed Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, running until 24th May.
The action only kicked off moments ago and here’s Leonato, the corpulent owner of Messina FC, sweating up a storm getting a blowjob from his sexy PR while iPhoning his wife. He’s in a monster good mood on account of his team having just won the European Cup, his players about to join him at his opulent gaff, all on the hunt for available skirt.
Welcome to the RSC’s brilliant new Much Ado, transposed from Shakespeare’s original courtly setting to our modern world of wealthy lads and wannabe wags under constant surveillance from social media. It’s a clever time-shift, the virile young soccer stars an appropriate swap for the bard’s lusty soldiers returning victorious from battle, all that testosterone still running wild down the centuries. And by-and-large, the script mostly – not always, but mostly – fits like a keeper’s glove.
This is a world all-too familiar, a world of them and the rest of us, young gods and mere mortals. This is the world of Marcus Rashford who earns £300,000 per week. That’s over £15,000,000 a year in case you were wondering. Quite a slap in the face for all you nurses and teachers and others out there barely recompensed for doing something useful for a living. Anyway, Marcus is currently loaned out to Aston Villa from Manchester United because he couldn’t be bothered to put in a decent shift at his parent club and allegedly liked to party a little more than he liked to score the goals he was being paid for. Whatever, Marcus is set up for several lifetimes so why should he care?
Our start is somewhat confusing, all the jubilant lads just off the pitch in the tunnel where Beatrice, a broadcaster seemingly modelled on the BBC and Sky’s Alex Scott, a no-nonsense tell-it-like-it-is pundit who stands up strong against all those misogynist Fast Show-skit “Where’s the bloke?” type blokes.
Freema Agyeman was superb as Olivia in the RSC’s recent Twelfth Night and so she is again here as Beatrice, a gal determined to hold her own in an arena of idiot men. She and Nick Blood’s equally splendid team skipper Benedick (“often pronounced “Benny Dick”) are the beating heart of the show, their combative relationship built on a love they’re too stubborn to admit. The scenes they share are the comic core which keeps us on course when all around gets a mite chaotic. It’s a messy enough play as written and, much as this production always sparkles, there are points where director Michael Longhurst goes a bit overboard. The masked disco scene, for instance, full of snippets of popular songs, looks great but overwhelms the plot, lines sometimes lost in the melee and, unless you’re familiar with the script, you’ll likely emerge dazed in a state of “who, what, why now?”, dizzied by all the “OMG” texts flashing up on the screens.
That said, there are enough stunning set-pieces to see us through more than satisfied. Benedick on the masseur’s table and submerged in the pool, Eleanor-Worthington-Cox’s Hero enjoying her hen night in her bedroom with her bosom buds while her intended, the winning goal-scorer Claudio, a magnificent turn from Daniel Adeosun, is about to have his stag night destroyed down below are scenes to remember. So is the mini orgy set up by Nojan Khazai’s underplayed villain Don John. He’s a slimy so-and-so whose lack of motivation for inflicting emotional carnage has hitherto troubled many an audience but the cast on his foot cannily resolves the matter here, suggesting he’s been benched with an injury, missed all the glory and is seething with envy. His conspirators in this mean masquerade are Gina Bramhill’s Margaret, the go-getting PR who turns out to be a sad victim of her own ambition, and Jay Taylor’s Borachio, here representing the paparazzi scum who’ll stop at nothing to make some cash-in-hand generating juicy clickbait. Both are convincingly drawn.
In fact, the entire cast is excellent. Peter Forbes’ Leonato is the self-obsessed, self-made bore as monumentally bluff as Robert Maxwell. Tanya Franks doesn’t have that much to do as Antonia, his wife, but when she needs to show her claws, boy is she fierce, and Oliver Husband’s Don Pedro, the avuncular manager with an answer for everything who really just wants to be one of the boys, keeps it all moving along nicely.
Even the tedious stuff with the Watch, surely one of the laziest and least funny pieces Shakespeare ever put pen to, is made bearable by the stupendous over-acting of Antonio Magro as Dogberry and Nick Cavaliere as his stooge Verges – some feat!
Much Ado is not necessarily an easy play to like. Thanks to the engaging tussle between Agyeman and Blood, it just about comes across as a feelgood rom-com but there are less cheerful things going on as well. The fact that Leonato is so readily convinced that his daughter Hero has been putting it about and would willingly see her die for it is uncomfortably close to the barbaric honour killings with which some women are still plagued today. And why on earth, since he has proven himself such a dickhead in being duped and ditching her at the altar, would Hero joyfully take Claudio back - a decision which completely undermines all the good work Beatrice has done in railing against the odiously pejorative term, wag.
Apparently back in Tudor times the “Nothing” in the play’s title was pronounced “noting” which refers to all the deceptions upon which the plot is based. But “Nothing” was also a slang for vagina – the woman having nothing hanging between her legs inferring the man gives and the woman takes. It’s a sorry sexist joke on Shakespeare’s part and fits nicely, if nastily, in with this production’s dichotomy.
Shorn of its soccer setting, usually Much Ado makes a case for the randy male of the species being hypocritically obsessed with the virtue of their chosen partners, and the ladies have the last laugh. Here though, introduced into the sport’s stubbornly clinging manosphere, it’s hard to view the women – Beatrice aside - as anything other than gorgeous chancers, sights keenly set on securing a trophy suitor. Which I imagine was absolutely not the intention. Problem is, you get one, you get the other - you can’t divorce the shag-hungry lads from the female fortune seekers, they come literally joined at the loins.
Which plays right into the hands of such unrepentant machismo peddlers as ex-Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane who, moaning about the difficulty of signing players to Sunderland who he managed briefly and very badly, said: “If they don't want to come because their wife wants to go shopping in London, then it is a sad state of affairs. Unfortunately, that is what is influencing a lot of footballers' decisions. Priorities have changed and they are being dictated to by their wives and girlfriends.”
It’ll take more than VAR to sort that one out, Brian.
