LAUSR

The Dons are back in town! Simon Dormandy’s Much Ado found Shakespeare’s knotty comedy of courtship’s complications unfolding in a luxurious modern-day Sicilian spa resort, Don Pedro’s choice of location to celebrate the triumphant conclusion to his turf war against bellicose fellow Mob boss, Don John. Explaining the rationale behind his choice of setting and context, Dormandy made constant mention, both in the theatre programme and the colloquium on the following day, of “dark themes” and “the dark well running beneath the sunny surface”. This juxtaposition of light, holiday festivity and the more sinister, latent social issues within Shakespeare’s Sicilian drama was ably translated into what is now culturally familiar territory. Since Coppola’s 1972 adaption of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather (1969), the Mafia, with its historical hierarchies and passé patriarchal prototypes, has been the inspiration and focus for an abundant array of cultural crops, including everything from Mafia musicals to Cosa Nostra-themed comics. Within this familiar framework Dormandy made use of a community’s suppressed anxiety, where the only reaction to the godfather appearing at your gates is to throw them open and kiss his hand, and where daughters are little more than political currency. Such a setting ideally positions relationships between the play’s chief protagonists in a suitably murky and nuanced past that Shakespeare hints at but for which he never provides the true personal and political contexts. Don Pedro (played by Peter Guinness) emerged as the ambiguous figure of mobster-prince, his semi-chivalric principles at odds with a violent and licentious persona that raised questions as to the opaque history he shared with equivocal resort owner Leonato (David Rintoul). So too did the repartee and persiflage between John Hopkins’ Benedick, the savvy consigliere to “the family”, and the sharp-tongued, worldly wise and sardonic hotel manager, Beatrice (Mel Giedroyc), hint at a shared and chequered past. In a play where verisimilitude becomes a plaything for the powerful, and where matchmaking and wooing take place through masquerade and trickery, Naomi Dawson’s lavish set and carefully considered costumes emphasised the double worlds of light and obscurity. While linen suits and loafers represented the lighter, politer events of the day, the use of darkness, dry ice and disguise heightened ambiguity, doubling of character and the murkier leitmotif of patriarchal power. The first masked scene saw the cast appear as characters from popular culture, notably from film and television. Whether by choice or chance, the themes of the masque uncannily paralleled a Harvey Weinstein-esque vision of a superficial Tinsel Town – yet another world of dated patriarchal mores where woman have been treated as commodities. Thus, masculine power was epitomised through male characters dressed as superheroes or monsters, their faces concealed, while females were exhibited open-faced, as either cartoon characters or farm animals. Benedick (fittingly dressed as a dinosaur) had previously jested on Hero’s stature, both in character and position, as “Leonato’s short daughter” (1.1.200–01), and Kate Lamb’s demure and somewhat clichéd ingénue initially appeared