AISLE SAY Boston
Much Ado About Nothing
By William Shakespeare
Directed by Tina Packer
At the Mount Mainsatge, Lenox, MA, Summer 1995
Reviewed by G.L. Horton
The Shakespeare and Company main stage production of "Much Ado About Nothing"
is so close to perfection that it is almost impious to attempt to dissect it..
It is an organic whole, a living thing, and the appropriate response is simply
applause. Director Tina Packer has been working with this text and this stage
and this company for what amounts to an artistic lifetime, and the sum of all
that experience adds up to a "Much Ado" that should be seen, savored, and cherished
in the memory forever. Lighting designer Michael Giannitti has bathed the Company's
outdoor stage with magic beams. In the ceremonial scenes, set and costume designer
John Pennoyer has devised a Watteau-inspired wealth of detail stretching into
the grove's leafy distance as far as the eye can travel. Packer and choreographer
Susan Dibble have plotted the actors' movement through this space as one vast
dance, while miraculously maintaining an impression of naturalness and spontaneity.
In Ariel Bock's Beatrice and Jonathan Epstein 's Benedicke the production has
a quarreling couple as downright and witty as one could wish. They display a full
set of foibles along with their abundant charm. But they are clearly creatures
who, seeing at a slant, also see farther and deeper than their friends -- and
they are clearly born to love each other. The peculiar virtue of this production
is its balance. It is almost unfair to single out any particular actor for praise.
Each of them, down to the smallest of the children swelling the crowd scenes,
contributes exactly as much as is appropriate to enrich the whole, and not an
ego-drop more. This is the sort of seamless ensemble theatre lovers dream about,
the kind that takes years to assemble. The clowns of the Watch, led by Jonathan
Croy 's Dogberry and Timothy Saukiavicus 's Verges, are funny because they are
honestly trying to do a neighborly job; and even funnier because they don't resort
to extraneous shtick to cue the audience's laughter. The relationship between
Hero (Kristin Wold) and Claudio (Allyn Burrows) is the subject of "Much Ado"'s
main plot, and for once these usually shallow figures have dimensionality. The
pair's pain and rage at betrayal is given full emotional weight, even at the risk
of making their eventual reconciliation impossible. It is the power of music and
ritual that allows them to forgive and forget, in a stunning graveyard scene of
mystical transmutation. Packer stages it to resemble emblems out of the middle
ages: the scourging of a saint, the consecration of a knight, a baptism. Count
Claudio is stripped of rank and raiment while a choir sings, and then, wrapped
in white for the wedding that -- because he has surrendered his self will and
his power to choose, and sworn to cherish his wife whoever she may be -- symbolizes
his rebirth. The sole oddity in this superlative but quite traditional production
grows out of the director's focus on the "silencing" of women in "a society where
women have power only through their alliance with powerful men." Packer has decided
that in the place of the bastard brother Don John, the character of the aggrieved
sibling who is embittered and jealous of Don Pedro's monopoly of the family's
wealth and power should be a sister, Donna Gianna. Corinna May plays this virago
with a cracking bullwhip and a blood-curdling snarl. Ms. May's skill makes the
director's notion plausible, though not persuasive. Destroying the reputation
and the life of Hero, a young woman who has never harmed her, breaking up Claudio's
marriage simply because Claudio is one of her resented brother's buddies: this
seems a pretty roundabout way for a villain to punish her brother. Whether John
or Gianna, Shakespeare might have given him/her a speech or two more by way of
justification. But suppose those speeches had Edmund the Bastard's eloquence?
"Much Ado" would be "About Something Else", and the play would have to end not
in a double wedding and a dance but as "Lear" does, in a heap of dead bodies.
Surely it is to consider too curiously to consider so? Donna Gianna is led on
in chains at the end , her face bruised and bloody. Shakespeare has his villain
disappear once the plot is set in motion,. The best comment on that is Benedicke's
: "Play, music...think not on him (or her?) until tomorrow."