It’s like classical theatre’s version of Fight Club. The first rule of Shakespearean comedy is you do not let it last more than three hours. The second rule of Shakespearean comedy is YOU DO NOT… etc.  Iqbal Khan’s revival, staged by the RSC as part of the World Shakespeare Festival, relocates the action from Messina to modern Delhi. The production is tonally acute but, perhaps as the price of that success, its pacing is all over the place.
    
Much is made of the Indian fondness for oratorical performance, and pretty much every character is “on” most of the time, even the truculent Don John. It strikes an interesting dramatic mood, but the performers all too often opt for a stately rhetorical pace to match. One can see the temptation here for a venerable actor such as Madhav Sharma, playing Leonato, but sometimes the whole package is taken too far. Sagar Arya’s Claudio, so self-conscious that he delivers his wedding repudiation of Hero formally into a microphone, comes over much of the time as a stiff-necked prig whose appeal (whether romantically to the women or comradely to the men) is a mystery.
    
Such lures are thankfully resisted by the two leads, the antagonists in Shakespeare’s “merry war”. Meera Syal’s Beatrice enjoys her sharp tongue but knows also when to bite it back; Paul Bhattacharjee’s Benedick keeps bantering to stop himself engaging more deeply. Even here, though, things do not always pay off. A production so aware of issues of gender roles and above all of codes of “honour” ought to be able to pull its audience up short when Beatrice commands Benedick, “Kill Claudio”; instead, the press-night house gave it one of the biggest laughs of the evening.
    
The low comedy of the City Watch is as strained as usual; Khan runs an additional risk, by having Simon Nagra’s Dogberry make malapropism-laden pre-show announcements about phones and cameras, of inadvertently suggesting that Indians have a poor command of English, when the opposite is more usually the case. Yet, that being so, line cues ought to be much sharper; instead, actors leave pauses and tread on each other’s lines as if they simply were not listening. This may well improve over the play’s run before it comes into the West End in late September; it could account for a significant chunk of the half-hour which needs to be shaved if its percipience is to acquire the necessary matching momentum.
     
Written for the Financial Times.