Freema Agyeman scores in football-themed Shakespeare
⭑⭑⭑
Freema Agyeman & Nick Blood in Much Ado About Nothing. Photo: Marc Brenner
Dear England is playing at the National Theatre, and now our second most subsidised theatre, the Royal Shakespeare Company, has a football themed play as well. But did Much Ado About Nothing score or was it a load of balls? And did Freema Agyeman from Doctor Who and New Amsterdam, and Nick Blood from Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D as Beatrice and Benedick hit the back of the net?
First of all, spoiler alert, I will be talking about the plot of Much Ado About Nothing. You won’t be surprised that this production doesn’t set Much Ado About Nothing is set in modern times. Some people object to reimagining Shakespeare’s plays in other times and places. Personally, I find it can offer helpful insights, and this particular Shakespeare play needs them. Let me explain.
There are two parallel love stories in Much Ado About Nothing- a comic one which is probably what makes it one of the most popular of Shakespeare’s comedies, and a serious plot which can be a problem for a modern audience to comprehend.
Let’s look at the light-hearted element first- the relationship between Benedick and Beatrice, two people who are wary of hitching themselves to a partner. So, in all the time they’ve spent avoiding marriage, they’re become quite mature, and able to present a front of cutting cynicism. Shakespeare leaves no doubt there is something in each of them that is attractive to the other, except they won’t admit it, and they cover this by insulting each other. So the fun is in the way they’re eventually tricked by their friends into admitting that they do love one another, and then how love changes them. Benedick finds himself having to choose between his love and his comrade.
Freema Agyeman has only recently returned to theatre after a long spell acting on American TV but she is already building a reputation as a stage actor, and this performance will undoubtedly cement it. She speaks the lines beautifully. Her Beatrice gives as good as she gets, and offers apparent confidence to mask her inner emotions.
Nick Blood is a likeable Benedick with an appropriate swagger. However they don’t bounce off one another as much as you might hope: They should be like two Premiership footballers repeatedly tackling each another. Instead their dexterous verbal sparring never goes beyond a Sunday morning kickabout.
The darker plot concerns a young couple called Hero and Claudio- and it’s a can of worms, because it conjures a highly misogynistic society, which is hard to relate to, even though Shakespeare exposes the sexism among the men, and the unfair treatment of women.
We meet a veteran footballer Don John who’s essentially a mischief maker, someone who has no clear reason for causing trouble, and no complexity or depth. This makes him less interesting than many of Shakespeare’s villains, who are given motives or redeeming qualities. To be fair, this production does suggest that he’s jealous of his young rival Claudio, but that’s not pursued. Nojan Khazai plays him with an alpha male charm.
Don John uses deception- and this is a play that involves a lot of chicanery- to ensure that the relationship between two young fiancées- is torn apart on the eve of their wedding. He does this by tricking Claudio into believing Hero, far from being faithful, has a lover. As an audience, we find it hard to believe Claudio, even as a credulous young footballer (they’re not always renowned for their intellect) and her father, who both profess to love her, have so little faith in her. Even more unlikely is the moment when all is revealed (after even more trickery): he says ‘sorry’, she forgives him.
Daniel Adeosun gives a solid performance in the thankless role of Claudio. Eleanor Worthington-Cox does an excellent job as Hero. another difficult part as she is presented for much of the play as a voiceless victim- she doesn’t even defend herself against the false accusations. She does show a lively disposition in earlier scenes, where she is given more to do than in the original Shakespeare with some added songs, and at the end is given some added ambition.
Shoots but doesn’t score
It’s hard for a modern audience to comprehend such a misogynistic, male dominated society. So that’s the problem directors face: to find a modern parallel that we can relate to. Michael Longhurst, fresh from his Shakespearean success with the David Tennant/Cush Jumbo Macbeth, has chosen the world of elite men’s soccer as the setting- not the English Premiership which surely is a league of gentlemen after Gareth Southgate’s tenure as England manager (I know because I’ve seen Dear England.) No, Italian football.
After all, Shakespeare’s play is set in Messina and perhaps the men’s behaviour fits, no doubt unfairly, with our stereotypical image of a certain kind of Italian male. Leonato, the owner of Messina FC, is the spitting image of Sylvio Berlusconi which usefully reminds us of his Bunga Bunga parties, one of which seems to be taking place on stage. It’s a fine characterisation of a self-centredh millionaire by Peter Forbes.
We can see that the position of women in this world is mainly as trophy wives and girlfriends. Beatrice is not one of them. She is an ex-footballer turned commentator, and we don’t need reminding of very recent occasions when misogyny was displayed against female football commentators.
So setting the play in the world of football is a good concept, and it works well initially. Unfortunately it never quite hits the back of the net, because as the play progresses, the football becomes less and less in evidence, and less convincing as the plot darkens.
Much Ado About Nothing. Photo: Marc Brenner
When you first enter the auditorium, you see what appears to be a stadium stretching into the distance. Thus far a triumph for designer Jon Bausor. However, the thrust part of the stage is dominated by a communal bath. Unfortunately this doesn’t work as well as you might hope. It’s used to comic effect on a few occasions but otherwise tends to get in the way of the cast moving round the stage.
The women are objectified and verbally abused by the men, the paparazzi and in comments on social media which are flashed up on the auditorium walls. So, quite a lot of misogyny going on there- with manipulated photos and fake news offering trickery that Don John could be proud of.
The actors playing the footballers are all physically fit, so they look like they could be soccer heroes, and the women are all very glamorous and could be wags. They give decent performances, speaking the words well, as you would hope from the RSC, and creating a world of casual offensiveness and sexist banter that comes naturally out of Shakespeare’s prose. What’s missing is a certain nastiness that the text demands; it’s as if they are passing the ball rather shooting at the goal.
The Watch- here seen as security staff- who inadvertently discover the truth of Don John’s plot are sometimes cut from the play. A lot of people seem to find their antics unfunny, but here Antonio Magro makes an excellent Dogberry, speaking his malapropisms with a dignified , obsequious demeanour.
I do have one quibble. Let me ask you a question. What do you enjoy most about Shakespeare? I suspect that no matter how interesting the interpretation is, and how well it’s acted, at the end of the day, we’re going because we love Shakespeare’s language. Because, while he may steal his plots from here, there and everywhere, when he interprets that story for us, he has such an understanding of human nature, that he creates complex, interesting characters who express themselves through the most wonderful poetic language which conveys to us all the emotions that they feel and makes us feel them too. And who might you think would protect that language more than the Royal Shakespeare Company?
So, I felt let down that this production of Much Ado About Nothing messed with Shakespeare’s language. Okay, not in a huge way, but to actually change some of the words for modern references and expressions, for example, bringing the word “twerking’ or ‘vaping’ into the text. I just feel it was plain wrong. I know it may sound stuffy and reactionary, and some will say, you’ve got to bring Shakespeare up to date for a modern audience and so on. But there are plenty of ways of doing that through the interpretation. The words are our one actual connection with Shakespeare, and why you shouldn’t mess with them, RSC!
As the final whistle blew, I felt the fun wasn’t fun enough, and the serious stuff not serious enough.
Much Ado About Nothing can be seen at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon until 24 May 2025. Buy tickets direct.
Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport rise above a messy play
★★★
Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport in The Human Body. Photo: Marc Brenner
The Human Body at the Donmar Warehouse in London tells the story of a middle-aged love affair to the background of the birth of the NHS.
Lucy Kirkwood‘s inspiration is Brief Encounter and other British films of the immediate postwar era that looked at women in a changing society. To hammer the point home, there are multiple occasions in the production when the action is videoed and shown on the back wall as a black-and-white film. Video has been used quite a bit in theatre productions recently, notably in Ivo von Hove‘s A Little Life and The Picture of Dorian Gray, but Ivo von Hove this isn’t. For me, the filming was a distraction, not a reinforcement, made worse, much worse, by having cameras and camera operators on stage, getting in the way, and killing the moment.
Maybe Lucy Kirkwood and the directors Michael Longhurst and Ann Lee meant us to be alienated so that, rather get too tied up in the love story, we could observe from a distance the parallels between the revolution in health care and women’s desire to abandon pre-war traditional behaviour.
The argument for universal health care is strongly made, the case for an affair between a rising politician and a fading movie star more uncertain. She rarely goes to the cinema and he is disinterested in politics, albeit able to quote Charlie Chaplin’s inspiring anti-fascist speech from The Great Dictator. Perhaps part of the attraction lies in each being outside the other’s world.
There is certainly a physical attraction between the two- the dice are definitely loaded by having them played by Keeley Hawes and Jack Davenport– and they do have in common that both are unhappy in their marriages, but, as in Brief Encounter, good old fashioned guilt and duty threaten to pull them apart. The echoes of the film are many but with some crucial changes. She, not he, is the GP. Both have greater reasons than a simple morality to stick with their spouses. And the sense of guilt and duty, in her case, extends beyond her family to take in the Party and her patients. The physical consummation of their affair is more satisfactory, shall we say, than in Brief Encounter.
Lucy Kirkwood’s dialogue is touching, heartfelt and funny and it’s an absorbing ‘will she, won’t she’ story. Ben and Max Ringham‘s score works well, sounding more like the tense background to a 1940s thriller than the stirring Rachmaninov piano notes of Brief Encounter. If only the production was as fast or exciting as the music.
Keeley Hawes plays a multi-tasking modern woman, not only a GP and would-be Labour MP, but also a wife and mother. Her husband has been disabled when fighting in the war. So, whether to save her marriage is just one of many choices she has to make. This makes the story more interesting as well as giving Ms Hawes many opportunities to display a middle-class stiff upper lip hiding a volcano of emotions. Often, when containing her feelings, she adopts a tight smile, but when she laughs, it’s as if an extra light shines on the stage. Her speech in favour of the new socialism and an end to Victorian values was so passionate, it actually received a round of applause from the audience. At all times, she commands the stage.
Admittedly, she is probably too glamorous for the ordinary woman she is meant to be. In fact, there is an unintentional moment of humour when her husband says ‘I hate your body’. There were audible intakes of breath from some people in the audience on the night I was there, as if they couldn’t believe anyone would reject the immaculate Keeley Hawes.
Top Class Cast
Tom Goodman-Hill, Siobhan Redmond & Pearl Mackie in The Human Body. Photo: Mar Brenner
All the actors are top class. Jack Davenport was full of self deprecating charm as a gone-to-seed film star. Siobhan Redmond, Pearl Mackie and Tom Goodman-Hill excel in multiple parts. Thank goodness, because they save the evening.
I can’t help feeling this play was not designed for the Donmar. Fly Davis‘ mainly dark blue set design with a revolve creates a sense of the monochrome austerity of the late 1940s and, with the audience on three sides, she wisely keeps the props to a minimum. However, unless you sit in the centre block of seats, your view of the high-up screen will inevitably be partially obscured. Much more detrimental than this, though, are the many scene changes which should have been fast moving and fluid but are slowed down by mobile props- tables, chairs and so on- being trundled on and off the empty stage via the aisles in the auditorium. Worse than the time this consumed in an already overlong play is the distracting noise of the wheels and of technicians whispering into headsets.
Earlier in the day, across the river at the National, I had seen Nye, the epic story of the Labour politician who was the driving force behind the creation of the NHS. The Human Body might have been a counterpoint, offering a microcosm about the creation of the health service at a local level. Instead, while strands of the story do offer insights into the struggles within the Labour Party, and the resistance of the medical profession and the need for free healthcare, these are not the focal point. However, along with the other distractions, they are enough to take the focus away from the conflicted love affair.
Laughter and tears looking at the role of choice and chance in love
★★★★★
Anna Maxwell Martin & Chris O’Dowd in Constellations. Photo: Marc Brenner
Constellations by Nick Payne at the Vaudeville Theatre is about the ups and downs of a relationship but it’s also about the choices the couple make, depending on the circumstances they are in at any given time or sometimes the mood they are in. So we see the same scenes again with different outcomes, and the potential to be very funny or desperately sad.
Throughout the multiverse of scenarios of false starts and alternative scenarios, and returning to earlier moments, there is a string that connects a linear story of a couple (played in the version I saw by Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd). They meet, form a relationship, split up after an affair, meet again and marry.
In one repeated scene, the man proposes using an analogy of bees. He first delivers his proposal in a stilted fashion, then stumbling, then smoothly.
The format is set from the start when, in a series of very short scenes, the relationship ends before it begins time after time, as each reveals a reason why they can’t get together, followed by a black out, until you are anticipating what the next obstacle will be. The funniest is probably when Chris O’Dowd ‘s previously single character says: ‘My wife’s getting me drink.’
It sounds confusing but it isn’t at all. It’s hard to praise the author enough such an ingenious construction that nevertheless remains watchable and funny.
The play is underpinned by the quantum mechanics-inspired theory that every time we do or don’t do something, a different version of the universe is triggered leading to an infinite number of parallel universes. This is illustrated by the love story between Marianne, a university researcher into quantum theory, and Roland a beekeeper, with indications throughout of how it could have gone differently. But what didn’t happen still informs our understanding of these characters and of what did happen in this particular story of two people who love one another but whose relationship also generates sparks.
And, in being made aware of the many possible outcomes, we inevitably ask how much if any free will is involved in our decisions? In this case, Nick Payne has made the decision to show us what happened when they stayed together, at least until a final choice of paths where, similar to Schrodinger’s cat being alive or dead, there is a one third likelihood of it going one way and two thirds the other. And, since the end is so sad, you also ask yourself whether one of the other paths we didn’t follow would have had a happier outcome.
So the play calls for two excellent actors, who can instantly change mood, and even situation, saying the lines with different intonation or swapping lines, and Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O’Dowd are both actors of the highest order, with a great rapport, which is very important in linking the multiverse of outcomes we are presented with. They are also great comic actors to boot, which is important because there is much comedy.
In this revival by the Donmar Warehouse, being presented at the Vaudeville Theatre, there are four sets of couples playing the roles. It’s such a good idea to show how different actors of different ages and sexuality enhance the proposition that the characters’ story can be told in many different ways.
I wish I could have seen the others but I’m more than happy that I saw this pairing. Chris O’Dowd is not a regular on stage but he seemed so natural in his role as Roland. As we know, acting ‘natural’ is the hardest thing in the unnatural environment of a stage. He made his character laid back in a type familiar from his screen roles, but he could also be angry and upset as required, and he has a comic timing that any stage actor would be proud of.
Anna Maxwell Martin is a regular performer on stage and, while many of her roles have required her to be serious, she has a terrific comic streak. She can smile or be offhand, trot off an amusing line and hold just the right length of pause for laughter, and use terrific verbal dexterity then move on to a heartbreaking loss of the ability to speak properly. I am in awe of her acting skill.
This is the same production that originated at the Royal Court back in 2012 with the same director Michael Longhurst (Amadeus, Caroline Or Change). He must be credited with some of its success, not least the simplicity of the presentation, just the two actors at the front of the stage, with a background of balloons, representing perhaps a constellation of memories or even universes.
So space is apparently crowded by multiple universes but what about time? Well, that may not exist. The flitting back and forth through time- and (spoiler alert!) the play having visited the end of their story actually ends with a jump back to the middle. This, it’s pointed out, is how our own stories exist in our minds: not a linear cradle to grave, but little fragments from all over the years. All of our lifetime in our head. That includes false memories. For example, Roland remembers them meeting at a wedding when we know it was a barbecue.
And talking of time, so packed is Constellations with these short meaningful fragments, and the concentration required is so intense, that the play seems much longer than 70 minutes. Which is a tribute to the author and the actors.
The Donmar Warehouse production of Constellations, with performances by Anna Maxwell Martin & Chris O’Dowd alternating with Omari Douglas & Russell Tovey, continues at the Vaudeville Theatre until 21st September
Lauren Ward & Sharon D Clarke in Caroline, Or Change. Photo: Helen Maybanks
I managed to miss Caroline, Or Change when it was launched at Chichester, and again when it moved to Hampstead Theatre. Now that it’s transferred to the West End, I wasn’t going to miss it again. So how did I find it when I finally caught up?
Well, I was a little disappointed but not by the musical which is great. I’ll explain my disappointment later. First the good news.
Tony Kushner’s lyrics are poetic and witty and punchy. Jeanine Tesori’s music goes straight to your heart. Whether it’s to make you happy, sad, worried or hopeful, Tesori is masterful. She composes in a range of appropriate styles- Motown, spirituals, klezmer. And it’s sung through, which means it’s a non-stop ride of emotion.
Then there’s the magnificent Sharon D Clarke, with her deep strong voice. You feel her pain and her rage. Her solid presence is so appropriate for the character who is at the centre of what happens.
Sharon D Clarke isn’t the only great singer/actor. Abiona Omonua as her daughter and Lauren Ward as the mistress of the house are both particularly impressive in a superb cast.
Sharon D Clarke & Abiona Omonua in Caroline, Or Change. Photo: Helen Maybanks
Caroline, Or Change is set in late 1963, in the South of the USA, at the time of the assassination of President Kennedy. It’s a hundred years since the Civil War ended slavery yet black people are still subject to segregation and discrimination. A new generation is rebelling. Caroline represents the pivot point between the past and the future- not content with the situation but not a revolutionary either. As one of the songs says, ‘change come fast, change come slow but change is coming Caroline Thibodeaux’.
Caroline is a maid, trapped and worn down by her job. The story, though serious, is told in a quirky way. The domestic appliances talk to Caroline, as though she identifies with them. Michael Longhurst’s direction and Fly Davis’ design are wonderfully imaginative.
To add extra interest, her employers are not predictable white racist Southerners. They are a liberal Jewish family for whom the holocaust is fresh in the memory.
In this musical pain is personal as well as communal. The husband and son are grieving for a dead wife and mother, and the boy won’t accept the new wife (symbolised by a divided set), which is why he latches on to Caroline. She is in pain because her husband has gone. There’s a lot of feeling building up and ready to burst, both in the household and in society at large.
The word ‘change’ has a double meaning because Caroline is allowed to keep the change she finds in clothes when she’s doing the washing. She is humiliated both by the fact that she really needs what is loose change to her employers and by the condescending way in which she is being given it. This humiliation lights a fuse that burns until it sets off an explosion of feeling in the second act.
Caroline, Or Change offers a microcosm of a society in flux. It acknowledges that racism runs deep in society, among all ethnic groups, but it’s ultimately a story of hope. As Caroline puts it, in the stand-out song Lot’s Wife: ‘Don’t let my sorrow make evil of me.’
For all that’s good about it, I wish I’d seen Caroline, Or Change in the smaller spaces of Chichester or Hampstead. The Playhouse doesn’t show the musical at its best because the large traditional proscenium arch stage of distances the emotions displayed in this intimate family drama with its low key incidents. Having said that, so many elements work that this is a show not to be missed.
