Review of Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing (Directed by Simon Godwin) at the Lyttleton (National Theatre), London, 10 and 30 August 2022

Abstract

Twomoments typified this production’s overwhelmingly forgiving spirit. In the final sequence, Borachio (Brandon Grace) was brought back on to embrace Margaret (Phoebe Horn) among a smiling and generally canoodling crowd, in spite of the fact that they had, between them, been instrumental in the earlier undoing and humiliation of Hero. But more profoundly (and affectingly), after her faked death and before her second wedding attempt, Hero herself (Ioanna Kimbook) entered stage left while a penitent Claudio (Eben Figueiredo) knelt, stage right, at her ‘grave’. Through her tears, she recited Sonnet 29: ‘When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes’. Touchingly, the sonnet acted here as a confession that, in spite of being jilted at the altar and publicly shamed by him, she still loved Claudio and contemplating him made her ‘state, / Like to the lark at break of day arising / From sullen earth, [sing] hymns at heaven’s gate’ (lines 10–12). It was an important restorative to the uncomfortable idea (probably quite acceptable to the play’s first audiences) that Hero is finally married off to a brute, in order to smooth over the public scandal caused to Leonato’s household. In this production, she was marrying him because she wanted to and, in this, she’d learned Beatrice’s lesson: ‘make another curtsy and say, “Father, as it please me”’ (2.1.49-50). Indeed, what this production did really well was to underline the agency of the play’swomen. Beatrice’s feisty contrarinesswas brilliantly personified byKatherine Parkinson. In order to underline her societal influence, the play’s closing lines about deferring the interrogation of the newly arrested Don John were given to her (in the text Bertram speaks them): ‘Think not on him till tomorrow, I’ll devise thee brave punishments for him’ (5.4.125-6). In the same vein, the change from the text’s Antonio (Leonato’s brother) to Antonia (Leonato’s wife andmother of Hero) upped the stakes and ensured that Antonia’s fierce interjections over her maligned daughter were maternal rather than merely avuncular. In the text Leonato insists, ‘I will be heard’ (5.1.109) and, later in the same scene, his caustic satire is enough to sting Claudio and Don Pedro: ‘I thank you, Princes,