Much Ado About Nothing by The Faction at Selfridges, W1
reviewed for The Times, 30 August 2016
It is a Shakespeare anniversary year and every toy shop in town has a Shakespeare Inc tie-in. This month, it’s the turn of Selfridges — yes, the department store — to show off its cultured side, by inviting the theatre troupe the Faction to perform Much Ado About Nothing somewhere just south of men’s watches. While booking, you can buy Coco de Mer’s Shakespearean blindfold (“Love looks not with the eyes, but with the mind”, £45).
Better artists have worked commercial alliances to their advantage, but better artists have also struggled to unify Much Ado’s darkness and light, as Benedick and Beatrice’s romantic bickering jostles uncomfortably against the tragic impact of a sexual double standard. Untroubled by such questions, Mark Leipacher’s production continues its mission to showcase the latest fashion ranges. Would Hero, whose virgin modesty is such a plot point, really choose a backless lace wedding gown? That the same model is flogged on the front page of Selfridges’ wedding website is surely a coincidence.
Much could have been done with the architecture of Selfridges; instead, we’re shown to a conventional studio rigged up in the former gym (sorry, the UltraLounge). Hero’s gang clatter down rackety aisles in their sparkling stilettos. Most physical comedy takes place low on the floor, in a space with poor sightlines.
To up the glitter, we get Meera Syal’s Messenger speeches over a television screen. Simon Callow and Rufus Hound oversee Dogberry’s night watch by CCTV link. Yet to look more than gimmicky, video needs to be integrated with performance — the decision to share dialogue between live actors and pre-filmed celebs exposes the terrible synchronisation.
As Beatrice, Alison O’Donnell is sharp enough, but there’s little sense of troubled history with Daniel Boyd’s Benedick, a man who has never found a metaphor he can’t gesticulate. Key moments between both are lost. Beatrice’s harshest test for her lover — “Kill Claudio!” — is mumbled into his shoulder. Elsewhere, it’s predictable stuff. As so often, Hero’s father becomes her mother, Leonata (Caroline Langrishe, giving an able performance against quite remarkable odds).
If this is modernity, it’s lazily so. At its best, Much Ado questions a world in which the wrong gossip, like the wrong outfit, can ruin a life. Under the neon of Chris Withers’s tacky lighting, this “reFASHIONED” version endorses the very superficiality it should expose.
