MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at The Red Lion, SW13

★★★★

“Nicky Diss directs but it feels collaborative and all encompassing”

Coming away from one of Open Bar Theatre’s shows, you can’t suppress the feel-good spring in your step. Nor can the English drizzle dampen your spirits. Clouds, heavy with the first hints of autumn, hang in the air. But so do festoons and lanterns, and the feeling of a summer festival clings to us like the pac-o-macs given out on entry. The audience resembles an end-of-pier coach party, except for the facial expressions. Creased frowns of stoical determination to have a good time are replaced by lines of laughter and joy.

The idea is deceptively simple, and over four hundred years old: Shakespeare can be enjoyed by everyone. ‘Open Bar Theatre’ founders, Nicky Diss and Vicky Gaskin, grasped this concept nearly a decade ago by taking the plays around pub gardens. Their reputation and audiences have been steadily growing until this year they received an Offie’s Special Producing Award. They present theatre how it was originally performed. How Shakespeare should be performed. I’m sure Will would be raising a flagon of ale in celebration of their take on “Much Ado About Nothing”.

It’s a gruelling summer schedule and the six performers work hard, but even at the tail end of this season it doesn’t show. They are having as good a time as us. Playing multiple roles (and a lot of ukuleles) they remain ever faithful to the text but with wonderfully crafted contemporary gestures and ad libs thrown in. References are changed and modernised. Even, at one point, Benedick (Thomas Judd) chastises Shakespeare for not anticipating that his language may feel a touch antiquated four centuries into the future. I mean – come on Will… think ahead!

Set in Messina, the play centres on two couples: Claudio and Hero, and Benedick and Beatrice. An early forerunner to the will-they-won’t-they scenario the play’s comedy stems from secrets and lies and trickery and deception. Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into confessing their love for each other while Claudio is tricked into believing Hero is untrue, two-faced and two-timing. Subplots and wordplay add to the farce, fleshing out the intrigue and the action. Of course, it is all resolved by curtain call, but in the meantime the actors push the comedy to the fore with an ease that keeps our attention throughout, even when wandering to the bar for a top up.

Thomas Judd and Elizabeth Peace, as Benedick and Beatrice, spar mischievously as the bickering pair. From the off, their sharp and cutting dialogue manages to betray the masked affection they have for each other. Peace pitches the delivery just right, empowering herself while still keeping a sense of irony. Doubling up as the villainous Don John, she convincingly switches mood as swiftly as her costume. Judd is a natural performer; quick-witted and with a touch of the MC about him, treating the audience like another member of the cast. On which note, beware! You may be press ganged into becoming a temporary member of the company.

Laura Harling shares Judd’s instinctive, easy rapport with a crowd. A chameleon, she switches from the vibrant and fun-loving Leonato to the suggestive and subversive Margaret, sharing all the jokes with us like we’re old-time drinking partners. Laura Cooper-Jones has a similar, commanding, bon-viveur attitude as Don Pedro. Paula Gilmour’s Hero comes with a subtle touch of shyness. One of the more difficult roles to play, Gilmour manages to give real personality to a woman too often defined by the men that surround her. All the while, Micah Loubon is having fun as her suitor, the fickle and gullible Claudio.

Nicky Diss directs but it feels collaborative and all encompassing. Shakespeare virgins will enjoy this as much as Shakespeare aficionados. Open Bar’s gift is that they brush away any preconceptions some people may have. And what better way to experience it than in a pub garden with a pint of real ale. Just as it should be. Cheers!

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at The Red Lion, SW13 – then tour continues

Reviewed on 5th September 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Nicky Newman

More reviews from this month:

REBUS: A GAME CALLED MALICE | ★★★ | CAMBRIDGE ARTS THEATRE | September 2024

THE GATES OF KYIV | ★★★★ | THEATRE ROYAL WINDSOR | September 2024

BALLET NIGHTS 006: THE CADOGAN HALL CONCERT | ★★★★ | CADOGAN HALL | September 2024

AN INSPECTOR CALLS | ★★★★ | ALEXANDRA PALACE | September 2024

VITAMIN D | ★★★★ | SOHO THEATRE | September 2024

THE BAND BACK TOGETHER | ★★★★ | ARCOLA THEATRE | September 2024

THE BOYS FROM SYRACUSE | ★★★ | UPSTAIRS AT THE GATEHOUSE | September 2024

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

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★★★★

“a play of startling thematic relevance to today”

In 1956, Benjamin Britten wrote a pen portrait of himself as a child. He described himself as a kid who ‘behaved fairly well […] so that his contacts with the cane or the slipper were happily rare (although one nocturnal expedition to stalk ghosts left its mark behind).’

This reminiscence echoes the creative and personal tensions Britten underwent two years prior, in the process of finishing his internationally acclaimed operatic adaptation of Henry James’ ghost story ‘The Turn of the Screw’ (1954). ‘Turning the Screw’, a new play, written by Kevin Kelly and directed by Tim McArthur, deftly explores the darker moral entanglements of the period in which Britten wrote the chamber piece.

Set during the height of the ‘pink panic’, Britten’s homosexual relationship with personal and professional partner, Peter Pears left him open to far worse threats than the slipper. In one of the first scenes, Pears (Simon Willmont) returns home to find a frightened Britten (Gary Tushaw) recounting the warnings of a plain clothes policeman (Jonathan Clarkson) that morning. But the fraughtness of their relationship is preluded by the frame narrative of David Hemmings (Liam Watson), the boy for whom Britten wrote the elusive part of Miles for ‘The Turn of the Screw’.

The question of the nature of Britten’s relationship with Hemmings is the guiding dramatic force throughout the play. It is crucial, therefore, that the audience is first confronted with Hemmings as a man. The now veteran actor of deep RP register, opens the play by looking back at the nascence of his career. Yet, in a thought-provoking inversion of the once-choirboy’s vocal maturation, Hemmings overtures the opening mise-en-scène of Britten’s home in the unbroken voice of his 12 year old self.

“The sparing efficacy of the set is both open and homely”

The play’s action rests upon the lingering domestic anxieties which emerge between Britten and Pears. Poised between the position of their public relationship, the introduction of Hemmings into their home, and Britten’s frantic writing of the opera, the piece’s central anxiety echoes that of the ghost story about which Britten was writing. It shares the same fundamental question as that of Britten’s opera and James’ novella, namely, that of the nature of innocence and its corruption. Yet, the vitality of its conceit, and ‘Turning the Screw’s’ major impact, lie in the manifold perspectives from which this question may be approached.

The staging is deeply effective in establishing Hemmings as a spectral éminence grise. He remains a peripheral distraction even in Britten and Pears’ most intimate moments together, as when he can be seen methodically undressing in the corner while the couple argue. The sparing efficacy of the set (Laura Harling) is both open and homely, capable of balancing scenes of claustrophobic domesticity against the hauntingly fluid presence of Hemmings and another child from Britten’s past, titled simply ‘The boy’.

The pared back use of props further builds upon the Turning The Screw’s air of elusiveness, as in the only scene Pears and Hemmings’ share alone, in which the absent Britten’s baton rests ominously centre stage, upon his lectern. One is never entirely sure of who is conducting proceedings. Yet, one wonders whether the effect of this tantalising ambiguity—which necessarily evokes that of the ending of James’ novella—would not be better served without the qualifications of Hemmings’ frame narrative.

The result is a play of startling thematic relevance to today and, echoing the words of Britten’s childhood ghost-hunt, one is left to contemplate the nature of the mark it leaves behind.

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at The Red Lion, SW13

★★★★

“Nicky Diss directs but it feels collaborative and all encompassing”

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at The Red Lion, SW13 – then tour continues

Reviewed on 5th September 2024

by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Nicky Newman

More reviews from this month:

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

TURNING THE SCREW at the King’s Head Theatre

★★★★

“a play of startling thematic relevance to today”

“The sparing efficacy of the set is both open and homely”

TURNING THE SCREW at the King’s Head Theatre

Reviewed on 16th February 2024

by Flynn Hallman

Photography by Polly Hancock

Previously reviewed at this venue:

TURNING THE SCREW

TURNING THE SCREW