Since the resignation of Adrian Noble, every new RSC production has taken on the air of a job application. Gregory Doran, quickly following Michael Boyd's exceptional Tempest, proves he is still a contender for the top post. This is an intelligently festive Much Ado About Nothing that gets steadily better as it goes on.
Like Zeffirelli before him, Doran pays Shakespeare the compliment of assuming he calculatedly set the action in Messina. Stephen Brimson Lewis has come up with a pleasing sun-kissed terra-cotta set; the town square fills with oom-pah-pah bands; at Leonato's ball the revellers wear the visored headpieces of Sicilian marionettes. Yet, for all the local colour, there is something strenuous about the first half. The raillery of the two main characters lacks any real emotional context. And although the gulling of Benedick is wittily done - with an importunate boy messenger demanding a tip from the supposedly hidden protagonist - that of Beatrice lapses into farce as she is drenched by a garden hose.
Where Doran's production really scores is in the notorious transition from comedy to near-tragedy. Indeed I have rarely seen the church scene, where the hapless Hero is publicly rejected, better done. Gary Waldhorn's Leonato, an intemperate Sicilian patriarch, genuinely threatens to strike at his daughter's life. And the exchanges between Harriet Walter's Beatrice and Nicholas le Prevost's Benedick are charged with a heady mix of eroticism and violence. Walter's demand that he "kill Claudio" springs out of an incandescent fury that leads her to kick over the church pews. And le Prevost's Benedick, hitherto a diffident military bachelor closely related to his My Fair Lady Pickering, is forced to confront the agonising imperatives of love. It is as if the two characters mature in a moment.
Walter and le Prevost remarkably acquire a growing emotional reality so that their final pairing seems right and just. But Doran's production is also filled with enlivening detail. In a play that depends heavily on faces seen at windows, he gives us a sudden, shocking glimpse of the wanly immured Hero. He also, thanks to a fine performance from John Hopkins, reminds us that Claudio is a callow shit who seems untouched by Hero's disgrace. And at the end he brings on the captured, hooded Don John, whom only Benedick protects from instant Sicilian revenge.
This is a good production that should grow with time. There is first-rate support from Clive Wood as a solitary Don Pedro and Stephen Campbell-Moore as a feverishly neurotic Don John. Once Walter and le Prevost lend their wit-cracking a suggestion that it grows from a bruising past encounter, this production will develop into a vintage Much Ado.
· Until July 13. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
