Much Ado About Oakville's Pastoral Production

Much Ado About Nothing
Coronation Park
The National Post

There is a moment in Much Ado About Nothing in which one character invites another on a short journey toward the nearest willow tree. (Don't ask.) In the new production in Oakville, it's an unusually quick trip, since the Coronation Park stage provides, perhaps uniquely, an actual and imposingly elegiac willow, right there on site. It's the centrepiece of what seems to me every summer to be the loveliest open-air playing-space in, probably, the world. It's practical, too: a concentrated space backed by a vista that stretches, clearly and hauntingly, down to Lake Ontario. For the past few years, it's been the setting for a series of Shakespearean comedy productions that -- for intelligence, imagination and all- around sparkle -- can match any in Canada.

Some plays, though, make cozier pastorals than others. As it happens, the two most celebrated scenes in Much Ado are set quite specifically in a garden; I refer to the matched pair of episodes in which the two squabbling anti-romantics, Benedick and Beatrice, eavesdrop on carefully rehearsed conversations designed to persuade each of them that he or she is loved by the other. The upshot, of course, is the invented love becomes real, for both of them; they have been compulsively sparring out of a mixture of pride and habit, and are delighted to find release. At Oakville both the scenes, enlivened by characterful and inventive business involving wine glasses and an unruly lawn sprinkler, are delicious; indeed, it's a signal achievement of Michael Shamata's production that he makes the second episode, which is an instant replay of the first, almost equally funny.

Still, for the most part, Much Ado strikes me, more than any other of the comedies, as an indoor piece. Its dramatic climax takes place in a church, and its comic resolution in a police court, and the wit combats that make up most of its dialogue have a salon quality, giving the play the air of a continuous supper party. This production begins with a messenger arriving on a motorbike that he rides over most of the available terrain; but after that the play doesn't seem to have much use for wide-open spaces.

That doesn't stop it from being enjoyable, with occasional bolts of magic. The action has been updated to the Second World War or thereabouts, and the Spanish and Italian place names have been expunged. Don Pedro, formerly of Arragon, now arrives as the head of a small detachment of Canadian servicemen; Leonato, with whom he and his pals billet themselves, seems to be a prosperous British expatriate. There have also been some discreet textual alterations, ranging from the helpful to the bafflingly unnecessary.

Shamata's production is an explicit sequel to his Love's Labour's Lost last year; John Jarvis and Gina Wilkinson, his Benedick and Beatrice, appeared then as Berowne and Rosaline, the characters' prototypes. Jarvis last year made exhilarating work of Berowne's great verse arias; Benedick, who speaks mostly prose, doesn't give him that scope, but he is very good at depicting a basic decency trying to escape the tangles of its own cleverness. Wilkinson is almost too tempestuous to begin with, but her defences once dampened (by the garden hose, in this version), she melts beautifully. What's best about them is the way they work together. In terms of plot, the Benedick-Beatrice action is completed halfway through the play, but the relationship goes on developing as the couple, having declared their love, keep advancing and retreating, each fearful of letting the other have the last word or the last laugh. We end by hanging, delightedly, on their every word.

My favourite performance, though, is Graham Harley's remarkably unsentimental Leonato, a stiff-backed paterfamilias, crafty and snobbish: delighted when he thinks his daughter Hero is loved by a prince, ready to settle for the prince's friend Claudio as second best, equally ready to condemn Hero when her chastity is impugned, and finally displaying real feeling when he turns on her accusers. Claudio, whose first question about his intended is whether she's her father's heir and who humiliates her in public with self- righteous relish, may be the nastiest juvenile lead ever written; Brandon McGibbon makes the only possible case for him by stressing his youth and his callow adherence to a military code. Glyn Thomas as his role-model Don Pedro lacks authority but is good at conveying a submerged love for Beatrice. One of the production's admirable subtleties is that when Benedick, their companion-in-arms, finds his true self, he goes into civvies. Darren Hynes, meanwhile, as Don John the bastard, keeps switching in and out of uniform; his performance is gauche in some respects but reveals the character's cankered heart; he, too, seems doomed to permanent immaturity. Manon St-Jules' Hero is delightful, as is Chris Adams' musical Balthasar, singing Shakespeare's lyrics to good new tunes by Don Horsburgh. Keith Knight doesn't find many laughs as Dogberry, the comic policeman who gets his words wrong, but he plays honestly, and I wound up liking him.