The Play Podcast - 048 - Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare

Welcome to the Play Podcast with me, Douglas Shots. Hello and welcome to episode 48 of the Play Podcast, where we explore the greatest new and classic plays. I'm Douglas Shots founder and host of the Play Podcast. The curtain rises on the House of Leonardo, governor of the city of Messina in Sicily. A messenger has arrived with the news that war has ended and that the local soldiers will be returning safely home. Celebrations will follow and the men and women will turn their thoughts from war to romance. Among them, the young officer Claudio, who has set his heart on Leonardo's daughter, Hero. But there are two among the courtly sutures who do not subscribe to the conventions of romance. Heroes Cousin, Beatrice, and Claudio's Comrade in Arms, Benedict are conjoined by their shared determination to avoid the yoke of marriage and by their mutual antipathy. However, both of these couples will find that the course of love does not run predictably in Shakespeare's mature romantic comedy much ado about nothing. The Play is one of Shakespeare's most popular, primarily for the Merry War of Whits between Beatrice and Benedict, whose fiery sparring and ultimate reconciliation are the prototype for centuries of rom-com. But alongside their brilliant comic partnership, there is also a darker story of misogyny and betrayal that gives the play a more complex and challenging character, a character that also presents its challenges to modern-day directors. As it happens, I am joined today by a director who has just been wrestling with this happy task, because Lucy Bailey is responsible for the joyous production that is currently running at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London. Lucy is no stranger to either Shakespeare or the Globe. Her many acclaimed productions at the Globe and the RSC include Titus Antronicus, Macbeth, The Taming of the True, Julius Caesar, Timon of Athens, and as you like it. She also has a particular affinity for Agatha Christie, having directed Love from a Stranger and enjoyed both critical acclaim and huge popular success with her production of Witness for the Prosecution, which she staged in the Grand Chamber of County Hall in London. And as testimony to her versatility, she has also directed David Mammott's provocative play O'Leana at the Theatre Royal Bath in December 2020, which I was fortunate enough to see and to talk with Lucy about back in episode 16 of the podcast. Welcome Lucy. Thanks for coming back to the podcast to talk about much do. Hello. I know that you've done lots of Shakespeare, but I don't believe that you've directed much a do before. So my first question is, what is it about the play that drew you to do it now? Is there a reason you haven't done it before? Yes, I was asked to do it actually by Michael Boyd for the RSC and I immediately said no. It's been a play that I've tried to avoid actually. Oh, this is great. I'm glad I chose you. I don't really know why because I don't think I had particularly seen it. I must have tried to read it and struggled. And again, when I was asked to direct it this time round, I have to confess it wasn't because I wanted to do it. It was because I'd come out of, as we all have, 18 months of very bumpy ride of COVID. I thought, I've got to get back in the saddle. And this is a marvelous opportunity for working again at the globe. And it was working again at the globe that in a way drew me more to the project than the actual play, which as I said before, I've managed successfully to avoid it for the most of my life. So I can't pretend that there was something that attracted me and it took me a very long time to fall in love with the play. I've had this before, you know, I've come to Shakespeare play. I find them quite tricky to read. I'm sure some of your listeners will really sigh with relief when they hear that. It's not easy. I tried to read it out loud. I read it several times out loud of my designer who both struggling with the sort of 70% pros. But I do know and always have faith that at some point along the line, I'm going to fall hook line and sink in love with the play. And nothing would be more important to me in the world than trying to grapple with its themes and its challenges. And that, of course, did happen eventually. Great. So, were there any specific reasons why you wanted to avoid it or you just happened not to have done it? I just couldn't find a way in. It's sort of ruthlessly realistic. It sits slightly uncomfortably within a sort of naturalism, as I say, it shocks you because it's got this 70% pros. I'd never really come across that in Shakespeare before. And I was looking for verse. There's no wood to be lost in or an ocean to provide a marvellous storm and deliver you up on an island. So, you're having to confront a lot of the plot, which has a lot of improbabilities. But within a context, it doesn't allow you to go into an imaginative place with it. So, I think that was my main struggle, just trying to find a way in and a way to believe in the piece. That's really interesting, the idea that the improbability's a plot we accept because they may be in some imaginary world that no longer represents anything we recognize. But this is not so much the case. It feels, as you say, more realistic. For listeners, they're not as familiar with the play, but I wonder if you would be able to give us a brief summary of what actually happens in this play. Yes. I mean, in order to do that, I have to probably explain Douglas that we've swapped some of the characters from being men to women. And that makes a massive difference. So, perhaps it's worth saying that the place sort of takes place in a small town and it takes place in our version, in an Italian Palazzo. In Shakespeare's world, that small town has a governor who's called Leonardo. And he has a brother called Antonio. And it's Leonardo's daughter, hero who is the one you described as marrying her sort of Prince Charming Claudio. We also have another soldier, Benedict, who's a friend of Claudio, and they are led by the sort of general, if you like, Pedro, Don Pedro. That's the setup. Meanwhile, Don Pedro has a disgruntled brother who's illegitimate, who's also part of his lesson you call Don John. We have Claudio falling instantly in love with hero, and that being the perfect marriage. And the plot is about really how we stop that marriage happening. And it's Don John that tries to stop it through his jealousy, in a sense, of the position of love that Claudio holds with his brother, Pedro. So, Don John tries to stop it by smearing the bride, hero, by setting up a strange plot where they see her possibly having a liaison with another man on the night before her wedding. Claudio falls for this plot, and on the day of the wedding, he then exposes hero and rejects her. And it's terribly tragic moment. The only way round it, solved by the fire, is that the family then hide hero and pretend she has died from this extreme rejection, and start see how they can then find out who has smeared her name. This is finally resolved by a bunch of, like, Watchman, these sort of naive group of men who were there to protect Leonardo's house, you know, the employers, if you like, sort of volunteer policemen. And they unearthed the plot that Don John has set up to smear hero. And then, of course, she has then shown to be innocent, and that marriage is put back together. But meanwhile, the biggest arc of the plot is Beatrice and Benedict, who you again mentioned. And they are in love, but won't admit it. All the reasons to stop them getting married are purely psychological, rather than external. So you have these two marriages, one which is stopped by Don John, and the other which is prevented by their own problems of confessing their own love to each other. And that's the mechanism of the story. And at the end, it's always extremely happily. Great. You've done a brilliant job. That's fantastic. There is much to do, isn't there in this play? A lot goes on. And in fact, I was going to ask you, what do you think the title signifies? What is much to do about nothing? Is it, I mean, is it that, in one sense, the play itself is a lot of nonsense about nothing, though, I'm not sure that was just intent. What do you think the title is signifying or means? Well, there's a lot of discussion about this because there's puns, of course, on noteene, which goes through the play as sort of sense that in this rather small, provincial world, there's a sense of gossip and eavesdropping and picking up on the wrong thing simply because you're overhearing. And that sort of misnoteene, if you like, is perhaps in the title. There's also a pun about nothing being referred to as women's sexual parts. That's also in favour that it's much to do about virginity and not virginity. I personally play very little attention to any of that. You know, I feel the title is almost as much to do about nothing as it is about nothing. I don't think Shakespeare really intended us to think that much about the title. Okay. We'll throw all the questions. It was interesting, you mentioned that nothing when I was doing the research that nothing was pronounced noteene. And nothing is slang for female genitalia because there's no penis. There's nothing there. But it actually just feels like it's just a light heart and a common in life in general. That our lives are just much to do about not very much. We mentioned the setting. The setting is interesting because it's set in Sicily. And I wondered what you thought makes it different for an English audience that it's set in Italy, which leads me to the question about your own production, where you set it in Italy, but in 1945, just as the war is coming to an end. Why did you choose that? And what do you think? think is important about the time or the setting that you've set this play? We were just trying to find a parallel to Shakespeare's world that resonated more, I think. He set it in Italy, I think, because he set many of his plays in Italy, and it gave him an opportunity to talk about things that he otherwise couldn't, if he was talking about things that were set in contemporary Elizabethan world, you know. So it gave him license, and things that happened in Italy could be dark and sexy and dangerous, and it didn't matter, you know, it's like a fantasy place in that sense. Having said that, he's also talking about a very Catholic society. He's talking about a society that is still run by a patriarch where the parents have control on the future of their children and range their marriages. So you've got a problem when you come too much due, in terms of how you find another world that makes sense. How do you find a society that still has that authoritarian structure that still believes enormously in virginity that you have to be a virgin if you're going to marry, where the parents have such control? So it really tasked myself and my designer as to how to find this world that would open up the play, if you like. I kept viewing between, you know, we'd go back into Elizabethan world because I wanted to get to the reality, and I wanted to get to the bravery of Beatrice, you know, Beatrice, she's an independent woman, she's an independent thinker, you think of her back in Shakespeare's day and how daring and dangerous her wit would have been. And that really plagued me because I kept feeling we're not getting to how extraordinary this woman is. I wanted to find a period that would still allow a woman to open a mouth and for it to be dangerous and her to be seen to be a kind of eccentric or, you know, women who were too intelligent weren't marriageable. They often did end up in even convents or silums. Again, those choices weren't in their control. And so Italy in the 40s really still has one foot in the medieval period. And that rings true for me that I can find a society there where you still understand the control those parents had over their daughters and where the women in that society were extremely repressed. And I guess by doing that, it brings it closer to our own age because some of these some of these features have not disappeared entirely, of course. They haven't. So you somehow you're you're joining it up over time in a way. Yes. It's interesting you cited in the program a shocking fact that in 1930, Mussolini had made it legal for a man to kill his wife, daughter or sister in defense of his honor. It's not that long ago. It's striking that you've chosen that kind of era. And as you say that a time when Beatrice is outspokeness still feels somewhat exceptional. As you said in her time, it was certainly viewed with distrust, if not more. I was interested in the structure of the play too. You talked at the beginning about the plot, the way there's these sort of two threads, two couples parallel couples. And I was struck that, you know, we often think about the play now as first we think of the comedy of the relationship between Benedict and Beatrice. But in some respects, in fact, their story, as we started from, is only a sub-plot, the main plot being the courtship of hero and Claudio. But he builds the structure of the play deliberately with these two strands of parallel couples. What's he doing by putting them alongside each other and interweaving them? Yes, it's a difficult play for that reason. I think there's a strange shift in tones that the play goes through. But I think he deals with it better and later plays strangely, you know. But I suppose he was sort of excavating or looking at as he does in all his plays, how and why we get together with someone else. And in this particular play, he's really concentrating on the contrast between a male bonding and how that incredibly tight male bond produced by being a war together, how that's unlocked enough to allow you to then bond with the person of the other sex. So I find what's so interesting about the play is that the men are much more confident around their comrades. When it comes to the women, you could say that Claudio has absolutely no notion about women. And that leads to the downfall of his marriage. You know, he doesn't know heroes. He doesn't know him. They fall in love superficially on a sort of first sight thing. Everything's right about their marriage. Their families are right. They've both got a certain amount of privilege and wealth. It all suggests that this is going to be the most wonderful marriage. But in fact, they know nothing about each other. And that's revealed very, very quickly with Claudio's lack of trust in hero. And I suppose Shakespeare's been contrasting it with his other couple who really do know each other. And of course, we're so engaged by Beatrice and Benedict because then they feel so modern because they have a history. And very rarely Shakespeare's plays do you find that he refers to a history, but he doesn't much do. And it means that the two actors play in it can really excavate a backstory and bring that into the playing of that relationship. And I think that's what gives it enduring joy and recognition for all of us, you know, why we go on and on doing this play. Yes, it's purely structured, I think, in the parallels between them in dramatic terms. And at the way he sets up these scenes, there's what they call the gulling scenes where they're tricked by what they see. Obviously, the main one is you describe where hero is ashamed because they set up this mock visit of another man and her lady made dresses up in her clothes. And Claudio is tricked into thinking that she's entertaining a different lover. And at the same time, also Beatrice and Benedict are being tricked into loving each other because each of them are told that the other really loves them, even though they're pretending otherwise. And these are deliberate devices. And they're very dramatic and theatrical and they're wonderful to watch. But I think it's really interesting what you're saying about the differences in tone because this really strikes you doesn't at the first half of the play is buoyant and light, you know, the comic plot of Beatrice and Benedict coming together. You see that bubbling up and thinking this is going to be great fun. And Claudio and hero seem to be made for a marriage. But then Claudio's reaction to being shown that hero is unfaithful in some way is incredibly powerful and shocking, very dark. He shames her in public at the altar. It turns the whole thing doesn't it? The tone of it is extremely challenging within this arc of a comedy. How do you deal with that and Claudio's behavior? Well, I love this aspect of the play. You have to start further back in order to get to it, you know, that you have people who come out of the trauma of war and they arrive at a house, basically at a house party. So they go from one extreme to the other. They suddenly find themselves with just leisure sex. There's women around the first time and there's a lot of drink. So they enter this kind of bucolic space and they party hard. And almost the whole of the first half is about a house party. There's sort of no plot. People are just having a great time. They're fallen in love. They're pranking each other. There's a sense of release. But that sense of release is also very dangerous. What I loved about the play was you're on the sort of roller coaster ride where you're having a marvellous time and then suddenly there's this massive smash up. It's set up brilliantly because you have one fragile moment within the party where Don John again suggests to Claudio that Pedro, who is doing the wooing for Claudio, says this is where it all goes wrong, of course, is in fact after here rather than wooing on his behalf. It's all a very strange thing in the play that Claudio allows Pedro to woo his bride on his behalf, most bizarre. I think that must go back to the male bonding in the army that you talked about earlier because it is bizarre to our modern eye. Why would I do this? But they are so closely aligned these men. They spend so much time together. And as you say, Claudio doesn't really know here very well or vice versa. So they could get away with this. Yes. Because you also, in practical terms, it seems impossible. But I guess in that world, maybe it makes some sense. Well, Claudio and hero do not say single word to each other for the whole of that part. So Leonardo or in our version Leonardo, she tells her daughter about Claudio and about the whole marriage happening. And Pedro does the wooing for Claudio. Meanwhile, you have bitches in Benedict who can't stop talking. So it's a lovely contrast between the two couples. Claudio here is saying nothing to each other until the day of the wedding, as far as we're aware, it's all offstage their conversations. But bitches in Benedict's conversations are all on stage. You see everyone of their meetings. That's very interesting. But at the party, this very suggestive Claudio, Don John Finezim and suggests that Pedro is not indeed wooing on his bride, but in fact, is after hero and is going to marry her himself. And this gives Claudio the first moment of, you know, scene red of being completely overcome with jealousy. And that's quickly dissolves because Pedro comes and says, no, I've wooed hero on your behalf. I mean, this is where it's so bizarre. And there is temporarily happy. But then when Don John later at the end of the party suggests to Claudio that in fact hero is being seen by a number of men and is not a faithful bride after all, he instantly goes to that same place of distrusting her. And rather than distrusting Pedro or any of the men, he instantly blames everything on hero. So there is a misogyny in Claudio, but I think it's also to do with his own lack of self-belief, you know, that sort of get a longer conversation about what is it in Claudio that makes him so easily suggestible. Well, it's also possibly endemic in the society of the misogyny because this is what is so shocking, Isn't it that for us is modern audience is easy? so quick to judge hero being guilty, not to trust her. And I guess as we said earlier, perhaps because he doesn't know her so well. And of course, as you rightly say, Don Pedro's demonstrated that the union is largely a social contract. It's an arrangement. This is how marriages are arrived at. And of course, any disgrace really devalues that arrangement. So I guess in those terms, particularly from the patriarchal point of view. And I think there's also this theme. Isn't there about being cuckolded? There's all sorts of references to cuckolding and infidelity and the humiliation or emasculation that represents for men. But nonetheless to us, this is one of the challenges over the centuries is to say, when you come to this play, how do we forgive Claudio? How can he be rehabilitated? He makes a penance. She's died. He makes a penance and all that. But even so, you know, do we really forgive his betrayal of her so quickly and aligning with the men? Yes, it's a really tricky one because the the violence of his rejection of her is so appalling. And you have to go there very truthfully when you do the play. You have to, you do in a sense see her die. The humiliation is so extreme and intense and it's public. It's not just the small household, it's also to the whole of the town. So one of the challenges when I first approached the play was to say to myself, you have to do this play in a way that hero can forgive Claudio and that we all do forgive Claudio. And that's one hell of a challenge. I spoke to a director at the time. He told me a lovely story about an actress that who was playing his hero. He had done much of doing it done well and they were going to do it again. And he rang her up and said, oh, we're going to be able to do it again. Would you like to play hero again? And she said, you know, I can't spend one more night trying to forgive Claudio. Yeah, you can't blame her, really, can you? I love that so much because it's so difficult to forgive him. So the one thing you have to do is of course find the right actor for Claudio and you have to find the right approach to that character where you have to be sympathetic. At all points to him, you have to really like him and see his limitations and see his vulnerability. And it's really his vulnerability that's key and his naivety, which is moving. And if you don't find those two things, you're going to hate him. You've also got to see just how much he relies on everybody else to tell him what he thinks. And Pedro is a massive father figure to him and Benedict, who is obviously a very, very close friend. So Claudio somehow allows himself to be at all points guided. And that is also a fault, but it's something again that you can portray sympathetically. Then you have to make sure that when he understands what's happened and that he's caused what seems to be the death of hero, his grief for her is genuine, his disgusted himself is genuine. So it's sharing this in the story he has to have a night of penance. It's prescribed by Leonardo, or in our case, Leonardo, and he undertakes this in order to be reprieved and given a second chance. She offers that he could marry her brother's daughter in the original Shakespeare play. He accepts this as a punishment, not as a kind of way out, but as a punishment for the fact that he's caused the death of someone who was in fact innocent. So my whole aim was to look at that night of penance and really understand you go on a journey with Claudio. So at the end of that night of penance, he is a shriven man. And he comes to that second wedding as a changed person. So that was a really nice challenge. And I hope we pulled it off. You're just spot on, I think, about the only way to do it really is to present him as you did, as you say, as young and naive and steered by others around him in a way that, of course, he's not knowledgeable enough to understand, I suppose, or is a victim of in a way and comes through this shocking coming of age experience in some senses. And in a world where, as you say, the men's word has taken above a woman's generally, and that's been his fraternity, we assume an independence of mind in our modern age. And actually, that also applies to hero. Doesn't it's fast and wonderful that story because here's another question. How is it that she could forgive him so readily as well? Is it not degrading for her to just accept him back, having treated her like this? Oh no, I would have hoped though that at the end of the reduction, that question wasn't asked so much because yes, I mean, hero accepts him back because she does love him. She still has that love for him. She's witnessed his penance. And I suppose she begins. She's a woman of her birth, you know, she wants to be married. She sees marriage as really the next step in her life. What we've tried to do, I suppose, is in our production. It's to show us sort of, you know, when she comes to that second marriage, she stresses a very sassy, fashionable, independent woman. They're all in those beautiful, almost philineous, black, tight skirts and central hats and veils. And it's almost, it's presenting Claudio with a woman who is definitely no longer the sweet, innocent, malleable bride. She is a woman. She's moved from girl to woman. And that's how they're going to have to go forward. And they're going to have to get to know each other in that marriage. That's well said. You have to take into account its time, but also that she also goes on a journey and matures. But it's a world where those are her options. Yes. Let's come back to the other couple then. The skirmish of wit between Beatrice and Benedict, the Mary Wars, Leonardo describes it, which is a lovely oxymoron, isn't it? It flexes the paradox through nature of their relationship and their communication. What do we make of the arc of their moments? As you said, they have a past, don't they? Which must inform how they are behaving toward each other? I'm interested as to what you think that past was and how it informs the tenor of their banner and how seriously is it barbed? Are they bitter about what happened before or is it still all relatively lightweight flirtation? Where do you think it's coming from? Yeah, there is a there is business and there's a huge pride. I think my feeling was manyfold, but with Benedict, I feel that again, there's pride. There isn't bitterness, but that he he has this sort of male pride that to be outwitted at all points by a woman is very, very hard to take. Again, it's partly to do with the culture, again, the male bonding and machoism in that culture that to be seen to be outwitted by a wife is a sort of humiliation. And the sort of incredible paranoia of that culture, you know, where every woman is somehow fickle and not to be trusted, every man is going to be let down by his wife that marriage is a case of being humiliated at all points. The fear of that humiliation is really profound within the Catholic society and certainly within the society that we portrayed the 1940s Italian one and certainly in Shakespeare's time, this massive gulf between men and women cannot have helped that. So a woman who intellectually outranks you would have been very threatening and difficult to deal with for a man who wants to be the center of attention and wants to be the funniest and brightest in the space and that is what Benedict wants and that's what he's used to. So they clearly have incredibly affected each other in the past and hurt each other in the past and there's a massive bruise of pride. I left a lot of the detail of that to the two actors to work out and we it shifted actually as we grew with the parts we changed our backstory to keep feeding where we were as we got richer and deeper within the relation within the play and at some point or other I think I probably lost all the details of that because it didn't really matter as long as they were sourcing a history and as long as they were bringing that hurt and the armor that they were placing around themselves into the space and that then I was happy and there's a lot of armor going on you know to protect themselves. It takes the tragedy, it takes the appalling humiliation of hero and the shock and the aftermath of that to release Beatrice and Benedict from all that armor if you like and for them to be at last vulnerable to each other and to admit their love to each other. It's kind of in a freeful moment when life goes out of control for them where they no longer in control and things are being asked of each other which are very extreme that they acknowledge the depth of their love and from then on you don't really see it again because of course they now know that they love each other so they're in a way unit but the very nature going back into public with that love means that they have to again slightly armor up again and it's it's the rest of the play for them to finally concede to actually marry which is to them is a massive act not just to acknowledge it but to actually let go of everything they have believed in and publicly stated that they do not believe in marriage to actually let go of all that and jump into this sort of void together. So it's courageous and it's very moving. It is and I think just in the clues that might be in the text to their past is certainly some sense is there that Beatrice feels like she may have loved him more than the other way round or risked more previously she says indeed by Lord he lent it me a while his heart Benedict lent his heart to her a while and I gave him use for it a double heart for his single one Mary once before he wanted me with false dice it's somehow he's misled her or backed away at some point so is as you say perhaps bruised but also you said that attitude to marriage, that it's somehow there, there may be this fear of being cuckolded, but there's also a constant refrain that it's kind of a yo, you know, you're trapped. And I don't know whether there's some sense that Benedict is a bit of a lad and that all of these soldiers are, I mean, he says he's loved by all the ladies except for Beatrice. But that, so that's a relatively recognizable theme, I suppose. Hey, you could say there's a real fear of commitment there, but on both sides, it's not just on his side, what's so wonderful is that she's equally contemptuous of that state. She's equally contemptuous of being yoked to someone who she feels is not going to be of interest after a while, you know, it's going to bore her, it's going to confine her. And I think they both have this desperate feeling that they must be confined or limited by another. And of course, they've met their match in each other, and that's so patent the obvious, but they still have to obviously publicly declare that there is no one that would be fit or worthy of that to give up their freedom. Yes, well, I guess it's an alternative, isn't it a contrast to the convention of the society, which matches people, you know, on social terms? I think that's so huge. They're wanting to reinvent marriage. And I think they will reinvent marriage. I think there's a feeling their marriage is going to be unlike any other. They're not wanting to subscribe to that convention. They've seen it in front of them with hero and Claudia, and they despise, and they fear it. So there has to be a different way of operating the society. I think Blake's been really saying that. I mean, he's what I find so wonderful is his overt criticism of the misogyny, of the narrow-minded view of how people get together and do this extraordinary thing of living together suddenly, having never lived together before. You know, it's the most weird idea marriage, and his resisting marriage is just a kind of social contract about money. He's wanting it to be about love. And that's his Bible, isn't it? He says it again, again, in every play he comes to, and he looks at all these wooing partners, and as soon as they're going to get married, of course, he says, "Oh, end of story. I'm not interested anymore." But his interest is in how you get together. Yes, and as you said at the beginning, there's a very deliberate contrast in those two stories, and they're between Beatrice and Benedict, and that they make this choice, as opposed to the social choice that Claudia and hero, and I guess in some sense, is make. And they are so well-matched, as you say. We have this sense from the start, whatever the past is, whatever they're hurt, that they're unequal terms. If not, Beatrice is somehow even brighter than Benedict, and he has some issue with that, clearly. Beatrice is so wonderfully articulate. She's fiercely independent. She's the intellectual equalist, we say, if not superior to all the men, which is why they fear her, they don't understand her. This is exceptional, clearly. But there's a depth to her, isn't there, too, that you realize when they come together, but also isn't there a moment when she overhears people talking about how scornful she is in her character? She's actually genuinely wounded by that, isn't she? And when they both respond to the horror that is heroes disgrace, she defends her immediately, and without question, which is, I think, an important sign of her integrity. And then, as you said earlier, then when she asks him to kill Claudio, and he has to step up and align himself with her as opposed to these comrades, that's a really big ask for him, isn't it? Yes, and it goes back against the brilliance of the player, that it starts with men of war coming into a waiting space. So he sets up Shakespeare, this code of honor, and this code of practice, and this sense of people having been through trauma. And he is then, at this point in the play, having defined himself as entirely of that world of men, he has asked to kill his brother in arms. He has a wonderful apply, and he says, not for this world, it's a really pivotal line in the play. And it's a very serious ask by Beatrice, and his instant responses, of course, rejected. He how possibly kill his friend, but by the end of that time together, he actually takes on the fact that he will challenge him to a duel. In other words, he accepts that he will do this for Beatrice. So he's completely crossed a line. Up until then, his allegiance had been with Don Pedro, the prince, and with Claudio, his great friend, and his army friend, I'd stress to say, it's not a friendship that necessarily goes back years to boyhood or anything, but it's made on the battlefield of that friendship. But he's crossed the line to be with Beatrice. It's a really massive and profound moment, and she asks for it out of the frustration that she would otherwise do it herself. Exactly. Again, it's voicing this, the women's inability to act and to be active. The place starts with women who are inactive, and it comes back, I think, perhaps, we, this would be the right moment to talk about. The gift of the play for me was that by swapping Leonardo and Antonio to women, it created the space of women. And I understood, I sort of cracked how to do much ado at that moment when I understood a house of women waiting for soldiers to arrive. And the implosive chemistry that's going to happen when that male energy hits this female energy. And the play works all the way through it, sort of trying to redefine and define what this kind of massive free song between this male energy and female energy is doing. And of course, it has moments of complete disaster, as Claudio rejects here, but it then has moments of complete euphoria, as they finally managed to come together. I was definitely going to ask you next about this, because the play is basically structured as the meeting of sexes, isn't it? Both personal and the framework of the world they inhabit. And as you say, that setting and the way you reversed it, what does it do that changes it? But you've already answered the question in a way, because those scenes early on in your production of the women preparing the celebration lunch outside in this idyllic Palazzo garden, you have such a strong sense of the female household and the joy and the community of that into which the soldiers come. And actually, if you imagine that in war terms, as you rightly said, the reentry of men into society where the women have actually assumed positions of authority in their absence as well, they've been running the show in some way or other, causes more free song, doesn't it? That's more of a challenge. For how do we then rebalance? Yes, I started to realise, it comes back to the realism of the piece, that I kept feeling I had to really root it, that I had to so understand who these people were, that Shakespeare understood them entirely, of course, he always does, but I had to make them so truthful and real to something we could all relate to. So when we started to realise that it was Italy, that if we set it in 1944, where we were setting it in a world where we again could parallel Shakespeare quite cleverly, because the war in Shakespeare's play, you don't think it's a war, another country necessarily, you think it's a sort of spat of a war, a war that is a happening between regions. And of course, in Italy, the Allies were sweeping up the country, we set up the play actually in northern Italy, at the very last point of where the Allies reached, it was a place of great tension because, at all points, it was occupied by Germany and by fascist Italians, but at the same time, the Allies were coming through Italy and releasing it. So the Partisans, the Italians who were fighting against the fascists, were fighting in factions all around the country, and having minor victories are terrible defeats in this sort of localised areas. So it fed a world that really, for me, I could feel Shakespeare's play could work entirely truthfully, if you like, in northern Italy with these factional fighting, and with the Partisans returning just on the eve of the victory of World War II. So the massive euphoria of that release, but at the same time, the stasis of that world that just wasn't able to operate up until this time, you know, women tracked in uncertainty and a certain sense of deprivation really helped us root the peace, but it also helped us liberate all those feelings and justify what goes on in much do. I think it's definitely a setting where you can understand the dangers that are possible within this closed societies, that they, that, you know, the types of betrayal that went on in Mussolini's Italy, that makes it possible to understand how Don John is a villain, and I think he was dressed very much like a mafia of sort of figure in the production. Yes, he's sort of closet fascist. He's having to go along now with his brothers, Partisan movement of liberation, but really his allegiance has been somewhere else. Though, again, Shakespeare gives us very, very little detail about why Don John harbors this intense dislike and desire to destroy, which actually makes him quite fun as a character, because he just relishes in destruction. But there are seeds there, and he does give you hints that it's really centers around feeling displaced from his brother's respect. You know, he feels dislodged from it, whether it be about his birth, or about the fact that he's never won his admiration. I think it's more about that. It's really interesting about brothers, you know, in essence. I wish Shakespeare had written the part more, you know, I think it's a bit underwritten. Yes, that's true, actually, yeah, but I'm not sure there are many people who would call them fun, Don John. I love it that you did, because there is a question mark over what drives him. What are his motives in making mischief? As he says, he does say that he's a playing dealing villain, and that he refuses to affect the pleasantries required to prosper in this world, whatever this courtly social world is. And I guess one of the clues is that he is illegitimate. There's a stage direction that says he's a bastard and Benedict refers to that. So I guess he's an outsider. He's not favored in the way his brother is. And there's clearly that's a standard trope for resentment. You think of Edmund and Lear and others, I'm sure. So I guess that's where it comes from. I was going to ask you in terms of tone though, we talk at the beginning about the varying tones of this play. Isn't it immediately after the scene of disgrace in the church, which is so shocking, we have the arrival of dogberry and his minions of the watch. And they are essentially the clown act. And I was really struck when this happened that they don't come until like more than halfway through the play. And it seems like a bit of a surprise that they introduce a whole new strand in set of characters like this. And also into the context which we've just watched. So what is his purpose in creating these comic clown characters in the play? Yes, it's a big question. I mean, he he's used it before. It's a much dream. Of course, the mechanicals in it's a much dream has a similar feel to it that they're somehow the naive element that help us get to resolve the play in some form or other or are used to resolve the play in this instance of much ado. So there's something that I think moves Shakespeare about this kind of hapless guys who are ordinary. But through a sort of innocence uncover something that the rest couldn't. And of course, he's doing it from a comic relief on the other hand too. And he adores these characters and looks at them again and again in his plays in different ways. This is one version. I don't know if there's another one who's using all these manifestants as dog breeds. That's probably quite distinct. Isn't it too much ado? Yes, it's beautiful. The wonderful twisted language, male popism, as you say, is straining to express himself that a level beyond his vocabulary or ability or understanding. It's a classic satire on social presumption as well. He's a fissious, but he's over promoted. Clearly, clearly not as smart as he thinks he is. So a figure of great fun is suggested that Shakespeare created the character for Will Kemp, who was essentially the company's in house clown, who could be relied on to entertain the crowd with his physical comedy and improvisation. And maybe he just inserted them at this late stage for that purpose. But you're right. They do have an important part to play in the plot, which is slightly disturbing as well because there's a sense of dramatic irony going on throughout the play. Isn't there Lucy where we watch the relationship between Benedict and Beatrice? And from day one, we get it. Don't we? We get that these two are meant to be together. And so it's great fun to watch how that unfolds. We're knowing more than they do in some respect, the definition dramatic irony. Whereas the other plot, Claudio and Hero, does not go as easily and is sort of more uncomfortable to watch because we don't really know where it's going. The device to pretend that Hero was dead. Again, you wonder. You're thinking, wait a minute, enrolling on Juliet, which is three years previous, I think. That didn't work out so well. So this is a dangerous step. And the reason I'm renting this at this context with Dodbury and the watch is it seems to take them forever to get to this resolution, right? So they know the truth. And we know they know the truth quite early on, but it just frustrating takes them forever because they're so incompetent. They're not listened to, but in terms of our watching that, it's quite uncomfortable. You think, come on, can we just sort this out, please? It's either a great fault of the play or it's perhaps a brilliant asset to the play. I mean, he has to delay the getting of the right information, obviously, otherwise the play would end act three. So it's a very strange thing you're right that he deliberately has to play it out Shakespeare in order to give himself the five acts. That's kind of all he's doing. I may have been right then when he just inserted this stuff for Wilkamp. So we need a bit more here. Let's do this. I think so. I think the extraordinary thing though with the sort of Wilkamp idea is that the sort of acrobatics are really so hugely in the language, you know, it's genius what Shakespeare's written for Dodbury is unbelievably brilliant linguistically, so witty and clever. So I'm interested that he gave it to his clown. His clown must have had the most astonishing, wonderful ability with words, you know, as well as that physical comedy. I mean, we got kind of insight into it partly because again, of setting it in the 40s in the war, we had the Cadabonieri as a gift to us and it was real sort of Dad's army gift because it gave you all those lovely puffed-up statuses that you see again in Dad's army and we could apply them to the Cadabonieri in a very good way, I think. Yeah, it seems like a classic motif that the Cadabonieri and almost like slapstick silent comedy, but also but but with wonderful language as well. It's a great segue into the language. As ever with Shakespeare, there's so much joy in the language, isn't there, with them, but also particularly the rape arti between Beatrice and Benedict. And I was struck as you were to discover that 70% of the plays lines are more in prose, which is the second highest in Shakespeare's canon. So I was going to ask you, why do you think he chose to do this? What is the effect of it being prose rather than verse? Right, it's such a good question Douglas. I suppose it gives a speed of wit. It gives an artifice because strangely enough Shakespeare and Verses, they tend to speak the truth and in prose you can kind of play around with that in a much freer way. For me, it gives a sort of novelistic sense of the play. So again, it's sort of opened a gate for me into the play eventually because I realized that I had to accept the domesticity of the play, the naturalism of the play, and I had to make that a massive virtue, which was also led to a kind of organic staging. It led to feeling that you could watch people eat during scenes where you would not normally see them eat. In Shakespeare, tend to think people come on, they go off. Here, I tried to bleed scenes into each other so that one scene is overlaid and in the background of people doing, the story is continuing. I gave a landscape where people could sustain the stories of their relationships alongside other things that were going on. All that was opened up to me by understanding that sort of novelistic structures that play. I hope that makes sense. Yeah, it does. I was going to say because it does feel more realistic. You started from the very beginning saying that it's recognizable common speech. It's much clearer meaning. There's very straightforward plot exposition as a result. But on the other hand, you also have, there's sort of two sides to this, isn't it? Because you have very much the sense that some of it, particularly between Benedict and Beatrice, there's this social style of conversation. There's something quite formal about it. In some ways, the way they are playing with it and that their use of language is a reflection of their social status or their intelligence. Yes, it is artificial. Yes, they are playing with the language. That has some sort of thematic meaning as well, doesn't it? Something about where is truth or not? Yes, and how language either represents it or disguises it perhaps. Why are there moments when it goes into verse, which they use to elevate some of these moments in more traditional terms, cloudios, shaming of heroes in verse, and Leonardo's despair, his daughter's disgrace, or even when Beatrice recognizes that she may be in love following the gulling scene and accepting this, these are moments that become more poetic, I suppose. Yes, and she has just that one moment in verse. Again, it's surprising to anybody who knows Shakespeare that the lead character, we all know Beatrice, actually speaks only in prose apart from these nine lines. And these nine lines are very, very important because, of course, they register enormous recognition of her prize hurt. She understands a deep sense that she's almost self-destructive, that she's stopping something happening. She's learnt this by listening to her cousin, who's given a kind of character assassination in order to push Beatrice towards realizing that she loves Benedict and needs to act on that. I mean, that's one of the best parts in the whole play, I think, that moment where Beatrice shares with us. And it's the only time she genuinely really talks directly to us as well. The rest is there is a negotiation with the audience. She can find those things with us, but really, this is the moment that Shakespeare gives her to share with us, whereas Benedict talks to us all the time. So it's a massive contrast between the two characters. Benedict has a much easier time with the audience because his jokes are more overt and more obvious and more understandable that they really come off the page very easily. He talks to us, he engages us, it's sexy. Beatrice, her wit is actually far more dense and difficult and left feel than complex feminine, very sharp and actually finally more brilliant when you analyze it than Benedict's, but has less clear moments of engaging us to get us on side. I think every actress who plays Beatrice would have that challenge. I mean, she shouldn't compete with Benedict. I had to keep saying this to the actress. Don't compete with him. Oh, you can't ever have that it's not the same. You don't have to compete. You just have to trust, just trust the language. You don't need to find those moments that he's finding they're not there, but she does have this moment where she does just talk to us from the heart and it's a very strong moment. There's a sense, isn't there, that again, thematically about this language, that she is self-conscious about and they are self-conscious about the persona they're presenting and the way they're speaking and knows that this is at a layer above what is the truth inside them and she's very good at it. So when it finally pierces that, it's very moving to see Benedict talks about quips and sentences that are paper bullets of the brain. - Yes, the language that they use is often very deflective, but at the same time, it's also very powerful in that they hurt each other a lot. Ben and he can be it just, you know, we know it's the battle of the sexes, but they have these battles, these spats. And at each point, Ben and Dick always walks away, hurt. It sort of repeats through the play. That's the structure of that first half. And she's also left feeling uncomfortable and disturbed because she knows she's somehow puked at something. So language is a mask, it's an armor, but it deflects, but it also really penetrates in this damaging and dangerous. - That's a great point. Those two analogies, both armor and attack, but when Ben and Dick has to then express himself in love, he's not really able to do so. So he writes a terrible poem or he says, I was not born under a rhyming planet. So when it comes to the theory, the genuine expression of love, he hasn't actually got the tools for the language to do that. And as you said, we have a sense that the way they communicate will continue. This is the nature of their relationship. This is how they will continue to communicate. 'Cause you said that they sort of go back to doing that in public, even when they're brought together. They do it in a playful way. She says she thought he had consumption. - Yeah, yes. - And he took pity on her. But actually, it's just a modus operandi for them. - Isn't it? - Yeah, and finally, that's who they are. That's how they have to be. And if they took that away from them, they wouldn't be them. I suppose they just got to accept and celebrate that as opposed to be hurt and defeated and humiliated by it. It is the sex between them, is the fun between them. And it's the way they see the world. They absolutely share that outlook and they know they do. And it's finding that partner in life is very, very rare. Someone who can share your view of it. - There's a wonderful speech of Benedict's, which sets this up in a way that describes the fact that they have this intellectual, but also a great sexual chemistry and matching personalities where he talks about how no woman's gonna have all the graces. You know, that's why he's never, 'cause no one woman has all the graces. And you know as soon as he says that. Actually, it's right under you know, as Beatrice has all the graces. Of course, you realize that, don't you? - Yes, yes. The speech of denial, that's right. - Yes, it's meant to be that. A one final thing I was thinking about where we end up with the play, having gone through quite a disruptive period in this world, whatever time it's in that war has caused and the returning men into this world and how they've come together. And how does the community ultimately come out the other end, do you think? How do we feel about whether the peace of this community is fragile, prone to disintegration because of social snobbery or the misogyny or the conventions, or is there a more optimistic future that we see in the kind of models or values on display? - I think, Shakespeare wanted us to end ecstatically. He wanted everything to be resolved. It's an interesting one, whether that's just something that is in order to send us out into our difficult lives with a better feeling or whether it has a more profound philosophical outlook. I'm not sure. I know that he wanted us to go through all that uncomfortable feelings. He wanted us to feel dismayed and distraught in a way by the misogyny and the aggression and all that we've experienced in the play. But he ends with a dance. He wants us to celebrate. He integrates Don John into that. He makes everything neat. And as I say, kind of happy, not in a silly way, but I think in a profound way. He wants us to feel instead that these characters have survived and come through something that have changed or have acknowledged something in each other. It's a very optimistic, I feel. - Interesting, yes. I mean, I think it's impossible not to feel that coming out of your production in the globe. It was a beautiful summer, sunny day, and it finishes with the dance. And of course, the couples have come together. And as you said, in structural terms, that's a neat conclusion. We're still recognizing the dismay of some of what we've seen, which was some of the conversations we had as we were leaving the theater and coming home as because of the interesting different tones of this play. - Yeah, they still resonate, you mean, yes. They still, they have to. - Definitely, definitely. - Those are asking questions, isn't it? This asks question of how do you get together with somebody? How do you find that trust between each other? How much do you know each other before you make these massive statements of oaths towards each other? And how do you honor that oath? I think he's making us ask those questions. And he's saying there are consequences if you don't ask those questions. You get smash ups like we saw with Claudio and Hero. But this is a kind of human engagement that we have to recognize and go through. And I suppose because he puts together that end, he always does with his act 5s, doesn't he draws these all things together? Feel the challenges for the director at that point to say now, how do we get to that point? How have we forgiven Claudio? How does Hero grow up and take on that marriage now in a different way? How do Beatrice and Benedict actually reach out to each other and he to publicly acknowledge their love? And in doing that, your responsibility is to try and make a narrative that allows you to get to that end. So that we come out feeling that sense of reassurance, I suppose, or some sort of comfort, even with the dark elements we've seen in it, and actually the ambiguous tone at times or turns of the play are simply a statement that life is not obvious, nothing certain, love and life are not certain. And it's about what you know. Going back to the noting, how do we know? Well, we don't know everything, do we? And we can't rely on everything we see or say. All I know is that Shakespeare's given us this woman in a Beatrice. It's an astonishing thing that he has that the most intelligent person in the play and in a sense most interesting is this woman. And that to me is a marvelous thing that in the midst of all this repression and the difficulty of being who you want to be, the lack of freedom, et cetera, yet this woman finds a voice and is listened to, has agency. Is it some degree? She has agency because she and Benedict finally come together to make something that nobody else will make, this kind of relationship. It's a modern relationship. So that's wonderful. She is a recognizable and modern character. People talk about her as a sort of model of mature 20th century feminism, but extraordinary that it was written then. Yeah, then. And he's showing these men in a loving way to have all these terrible limitations of their birth, of their conditioning, of the army life, which is out of their control. The fact they're having to fight in that way. And yet he still manages to criticize them kindly and then shows us this astonishing intelligence that we need to recognize. I mean, that's incredibly forward thinking that he was able to say, you know, this mind needs to be free. Has an independence, has a stunning intelligence that we need to learn from and allow and allow. Yeah, that more importantly allow, yes. Yes, I love that. Criticizes kindly. That could apply to so much of it, which is what his wisdom really is. Yes, Lucy, thank you so much for your time. That's brilliant. It was great. It was a really interesting conversation. So thank you. As the curtain falls on the imminent marriages of the two unlikely couples, what might the moral be of their respective rocky roads to love, that what is spoken may not always be the truth, that we may not even know ourselves by what we say, that what we vow we may reverse because to quote Benedict's conclusion, man is a giddy thing. We should trust our hearts, not what others or even we ourselves might say. Thanks for listening. See you next time. To listen to other episodes, to find out news about future episodes, or to leave comments about what you've heard, please visit us at www.theplaypodcast.com. You can also follow us on Facebook or on Twitter @theplaypod. You're also welcomed to email [email protected] to suggest plays that we could talk about in future episodes. You can also register your suggestion on the website. Thanks again and see you next time. (gentle music)