Before the lights go down, the Lyttleton Theatre is filled with the sound of waves crashing on a beach and, when the curtain goes up, the stage is soaked with Mediterranean sunshine. We are in Sicily at the Hotel Messina, where bellboys and chambermaids dart across the lobby as a guest arrives dressed in the height of 1930s glamour.
The guest is Beatrice and this is Much Ado About Nothing in Simon Godwin’s joyous production for the National Theatre, which opened last week. Shakespeare’s comedy about love and deception has always been popular, and the “merry war” between Beatrice and Benedick has offered an ideal vehicle to show off the talents of the greatest actors of every generation.
Right now, the play is everywhere and there is another production running at Shakespeare’s Globe further along London’s South Bank set in northern Italy in 1945. The Royal Shakespeare Company staged the play earlier this year in an Afro-futurist setting and another production opens at the Crucible in Sheffield in September.
“I think right now, we all want fun. We want crazy, ridiculous stories of transformation and the passionate power of the heart. And on these hot nights that we’re all trying to manage, I think this is a wonderful Champagne-filled, adrenalised occasion which is Shakespeare’s gift to all of us,” Godwin told the BBC last week.
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That is undoubtedly true but it doesn’t explain why so many theatres came up with the same idea independently long before they could have known how we would all be feeling now. There is seldom an obvious answer to how the zeitgeist forms but time and again it shows itself first in the theatre.
King Brexit
In the months after the Brexit referendum, there were numerous productions of King Lear all over Britain, which were conceived when few expected the country to vote to leave the European Union. But the play struck a deep chord after that vote and the election of Donald Trump a few months later.
Some in the old liberal order were wondering if, like Lear, they had clung to privilege too long and had bungled their succession through foolishness and vanity. And the play’s truth-tellers — Cordelia, Kent and the Fool — resonated with an audience that had been shocked into remembering the importance of truth and the price that can be paid by those who cling to it.
The rhetorical duelling between Beatrice and Benedick, who wound one another with their wit before they understand that they are in love, finds echoes centuries later in Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. The teasing exchanges between William Powell and Myrna Loy in the Thin Man films have the sparkle of Shakespeare’s comedy without the acid bite.
But the sparring couples played by Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy owe much to Beatrice and Benedick as they claw their way back into love after falling out, insulting and denouncing one another. And they perform their love and heartbreak in the most elegant, glamorous costumes within magnificent art deco interiors to the sound of a jazz band.
Jazz age
By setting the play in the 1930s, Godwin chimes with another element of London’s zeitgeist, which is in love with the jazz age and the culture of the years between the wars. But like Anything Goes, which is delighting audiences at the Barbican for the second year running, his Much Ado About Nothing reflects the stylishness of that decade rather than its scariness.
“The idea is that it’s between one conflict and another but you’ve got this pocket of escapism. I felt glamour was essential,” he says.
Spending in London has not returned to what it was before coronavirus but restaurants, bars and clubs are full and this summer everyone is determined to have what fun they can. Like the end of Prohibition in the United States in 1933, the lifting of lockdown has released a lot of energy and joy.
Perhaps after all those months spending so much time online bickering and needling one another like Beatrice and Benedick, we are starting to ask Don Pedro’s question in Much Ado About Nothing: “Why, what’s the matter, That you have such a February face, So full of frost, of storm and cloudiness?”