Photo: AB Photography

The fourth version of Much Ado About Nothing I’ve seen this year, and the third in the last twelve days, is an antidote to all the others.

It’s an irreverent send-up predicated on the idea that the actress playing Beatrice (Flora Sowerby at the performance I saw – the cast rotates) is drunk or “sh!t-faced”. She therefore messes up the show with a lot of asides, falling about and disinhibition. Think – if this company’s modus operandi is new to you – Horrible Histories spliced with The Play That Goes Wrong and blended with an energetic adult pantomime.

Sowerby is a gifted comic actor and uses her height – nearly six foot of it – to great effect. She also exudes charisma along with the daftness and has the audience eating out of her hand. And the other five actors work seamlessly with her. It must be fun to develop a show like this. I wonder who came up with the line “Refrain from mounting my codpiece”?

But it’s a bit of an irritant that every time Beatrice swears – and there’s a lot of that –  the audience falls about laughing. Yes, it sounds modern and therefore incongruous but actually these words are centuries old and Shakespeare knew them as well as anyone. Witness the “country matters” joke in Hamlet. It’s funny at first but for me it quite quickly wears thin. It’s a show about drink, in a sense. Perhaps I should have drunk more while I watched it because I thought the chlamydia joke was over-egged too. Trouble is that at heart I don’t find the British obsession with drink and drunkenness funny but that’s a personal reaction. It doesn’t mean that this isn’t a fine show of its type. After all they do – sort of – wind their way through Much Ado and even speak some Shakespeare occasionally.

There’s a compere (Beth-Louise Priestley on press night) who acts as a quasi stage manager and pantomime-style liaison with the audience, along with some rather contrived audience participation: It’s the sort of thing which grates on me but that’s to do with personal taste and not a criticism of the show.

It is, of course, much harder to do something like this than it is to do a Shakespeare play “straight” even with a heavily cut text. You have to convince the audience it’s all spontaneous while at the same time keeping it carefully under control – quite an art and this company do that extremely well which why I’m giving it four stars. This is a classic case of a reviewer having to separate her own likes and dislikes from assessment of quality.

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  Photos: AB Photography

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