To trim a Shakespearean romantic comedy into a playable one hour takes skill, to stage it in the very compact C Cubed theatre takes that, some very slim actors and I think, coffee. This is accomplished with jittery youthful energy by the Lancaster University Theatre Group in their staging of Much Ado About Nothing.The bones of the story is still there. If anything, the cuts heighten the fun aspects such as the trickery with Benedick (Oliver Trumble) and Beatrice (Sammi Searle) and the theme of misogyny. When Hero (Charlie Hanson) is publicly humiliated by unfounded accusations of unfaithfulness it is Beatrice who helps plot Hero's fake death rather than Friar Francis. This departure from the original makes perfect sense. The story starts with Claudio (Rob Cattell) and Hero who have pledged to get married and Benedick and Beatrice, who have pledged to never. Both these situations flip as a result of mischievousness and deviousness and all ends as it should. But never mind the plot. This is a fun, witty play, full of great characters and smart, sexually powered dialogue. It would take a stiff pole to wade through the euphemisms - even the word 'Nothing' in the title is a pun on the Elizabethan slang for vagina.But the gap between the great text and this performance forms a chasm too wide, too precipitous to prevent the entire show from sinking into a self-parodying paroxysm. With one exception, acting appears to be interpreted here as a kind of communication defined by alternating turns in speaking. When one actor says his/her lines the corresponding actor stands waiting for their turn to speak with a kind of hurried look as if the No. 46 was running a few minutes late. As is common with many productions of Shakespeare, the language is spoken with the same understanding a twelve year old reading ancient text would, the Bible for instance, resulting in a wooden, nervous, uninspired interpretation about as exciting as Sunday School readings of Leviticus. The exception here is Ms. Searle playing Beatrice. She understands her subtext, is specific, fluid, confident in her character and wholly wonderful in her performance. The men, slim and dressed in white linen suits with black shirts, seem to have been sharing the same styling mousse and power hair dryer in a sort of ensemble impression. Their attention to their coiffs, while an admirable gesture, did not have the same impact on the audience as actual acting. Not for a lack of trying, at one point, an actor crossed a row of seats in an urgent move to say his line in the right place on stage, nearly trampling two elderly women in the process. On another occasion, an actor addressed his line directly to an audience member, which would be fine, if he didn't scream it. Still, the audience had a good laugh at the actors sitting on people, trampling on others, standing around - I constantly wondered what they would get up to next with their caffeinated antics. So will you. (Bring your own coffee. )
