Christopher Luscombe’s production pairs these two Shakespeare comedies by setting them either side of the first world war and by locating them in a manor-house resembling Warwickshire’s Charlecote Park. It has taken two years for the shows to gravitate from Stratford to London via Chichester but, although partially recast, they remain a delight. I’d go so far as to say that Much Ado offers more festive fun than anything on the West End stage.
Love’s Labour’s Lost has its charms. Simon Higlett’s design captures the idyllic nature of a prewar world where people play bowls on manicured lawns. Luscombe also brings out the immaturity of the male quartet who seek to shut themselves off from society and one of whom, in the manner of Brideshead’s Sebastian Flyte, clutches a teddy-bear. Edward Bennett as a boyish Berowne, Lisa Dillon as a sharp-witted Rosaline and Steven Pacey as a pompously pedagogic Holofernes – the last two new to the cast – all excellent. But the text is both shaved and slightly sugar-coated: the production misses a trick by turning the pageant of the Nine Worthies, in which the aristos cruelly mock a group of village thesps, into a sophisticated musical parody.
Much Ado, however, is an unequivocal pleasure. By showing returning soldiers billeted on a country house, the production provides a plausible context for the playful matchmaking. Don John’s attempt to destroy the marriage of Claudio and Hero is also partially explained by his irreparable war wounds. John Hodgkinson’s Don Pedro even greets the news of Claudio’s engagement with a stoical dismay that suggests he is more than a surrogate father to his junior officer.
But it is the merry war of Beatrice and Benedick that keeps the play alive and it is here beautifully played by Dillon and Bennett. Dillon’s astringent Beatrice evokes memories of Eve Arden’s crisp intelligence in Hollywood screwball comedies: Bennett, meanwhile, turns Benedick into an officers’ mess joker. Their confrontation, after the aborted wedding of Claudio and Hero, is also sensitively done. Having happily flung herself into Benedick’s arms, Dillon shows her ferocity by asking him to “kill Claudio”: a visibly shaken Bennett accepts the commission and, in a moment, seems to reluctantly mature into full manhood.
The production has many other felicities. Nick Haverson, very funny as Costard in the first play, turns Dogberry into a village tyrant living in a cluttered squalor that turns the examination of the play’s villains into a replay of the cabin scene from A Night at the Opera. Pacey as Leonato reveals a disproportionate rage at Hero’s wedding-day rejection that suggests Shakespeare had an obsessive fascination, stretching from Romeo and Juliet to The Tempest, with complex father-daughter relationships. Nigel Hess has also written a score that in one particular number, Come Live With Me and Be My Love, transcends pastiche of Cole Porter to match the melodic grace of its source. A life-enhancing evening.
- In rep at the Theatre Royal Haymarket until 18 March. Box office: 020-7930 8800.
