It is only natural that modern
sensibilities have problems with some aspects of the worlds of
Shakespeare’s comedies. And grappling with this in staging is all well
and good… except, I maintain, that it seldom works when done at the
expense of the actual comedy. That’s strike one. Strike two is that a
June evening in Regent’s Park simply doesn’t seem the time and place to
probe much below the surface: the Pimm’s goes better with festive
chuckles.
For the first half-hour or so, this was the attitude with which I
watched Timothy Sheader’s opening production of this summer’s season in
the park. The laughs, I felt, were being short-changed by the
directorial line that the men are to blame for all the unpleasantnesses
here. Notwithstanding that, in Samantha Spiro and Sean Campion, Sheader
has a top-notch Beatrice/Benedick pairing, I felt there should be more.
The first stage in my conversion came with the twin eavesdropping
scenes in which each of the couple is gulled into believing that the
other is in love with them. As usual these are the occasion of some
lively physical business, with Campion repeatedly braining himself and
Spiro accidentally shaking half the fruit off the orange and lemon
trees on the stage. Thereafter, my appreciation of these two
performances simply grew. Campion’s Benedick has a persona that is
always “on”, and his growing love for Beatrice is an account of a man
gradually locating his true self behind the posturing. Spiro has the
combination of intelligence and vivacity that enables her to inhabit
every nuance of Beatrice’s lines, and even her (rare) silences. The
duologue in which they confess to each other, and then like a bolt from
the blue Beatrice demands of Benedick, “Kill Claudio”, draws laughter
without betraying the enormity of the ultimatum.
Ben Mansfield’s Claudio is in any case a callow, unsympathetic youth
whose love for Hero seems little more than an affectation. Even Anthony
O’Donnell gets laughs out of the now wincesomely unfunny Dogberry
scenes, largely through the business of standing on a box to boost his
squat frame a few inches when talking to his underlings in the city
watch or to their prisoners. And by the end Sheader’s production has
proven itself not too dark for a summer evening, but an appealingly
piquant blend of humour and contemplation.
Written for the Financial
Times.