Much Ado About Nothing
- Written by William Shakespeare
- Directed by Dean Paul Gibson
- Starring Jennifer Lines and John Murphy
- At Vanier Park in Vancouver
I’ll get plenty of flak for this, but I’ve always felt Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing have one of the most profound loves in literature. They’re abusive, bitchy and proud. They call each other names like Lady Disdain. And, in the opening production of this summer’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, they move inexorably from delighting in attacking each other’s pretensions, really torturing each other, toward an honest love that blindsides them both.
Beatrice and Benedick are hold-outs against romance because they think falling in love means losing one’s self; in a good production – and the current one is really charming and mostly succeeds – that fear of co-dependency makes their giving in to love a profound release.
Jennifer Lines, perhaps the single best-loved actor at the festival, has the role of Beatrice. There are moments on stage, as she’s upbraiding Benedick (or anyone else that gets in her way), when the supremely confident airs and subtly bemused expressions that Lines employs put me in mind of a young Katharine Hepburn. But it’s John Murphy who surprises. We all knew he was very good. As the fast-talking Benedick, though, he’s absolutely brilliant. His hands move as though he were conducting his own words, and the poetry does spill out like some hilarious form of music.
There are two sets of lovers, though, in this romp, and they play against each other in sweet counterpoint. Hero (Almeera Jiwa) and Claudio (Gaelan Beatty) are the more “romantic” pair, wholly unironic in their lurching toward and away from each other. (And not as fun to watch.)
What all four lovers have in common is a marked propensity for being manipulated. Don Pedro (Martin Sims) fools Beatrice and Benedick into admitting that beneath their cat fights they’re in love. And Pedro’s equally manipulative brother Don John (a strangely static Parnelli Parnes) uses his powers for evil, convincing gullible Claudio that his girl has been unfaithful. If there’s a single failing in this production, it’s that Claudio’s subsequent public shaming of Hero doesn’t hurt us the way it ought to. The marzipan fragility of Claudio and Hero’s puppy love is revealed, at least. But director Dean Paul Gibson could have taken things to a darker place, could have emphasized Claudio’s blustering injustice.
The “nothing” of Shakespeare’s title refers, of course, to all those substanceless rumours and the kind- or mean-spirited accusations that get tossed around the stage. For some, the joys of manipulating others far outweigh the petty advantages of honesty. Such is the case with Don Pedro and Don John. They need lovers like the wind needs things to blow through.
But there’s a secondary meaning to that “nothing,” too. Youthful romance (far from being celebrated) is unveiled as an insubstantial farce, a set of manipulations and gesticulations that displace only for the moment a stouter, more demanding world.
Much Ado About Nothing runs until Sept. 25.
Special to The Globe and Mail
