On Stage
SHIPLEY, JOSEPH T.
On STAGE By Joseph T. Shipley Much Ado About Gielgud and Japan Takarazuka Dance Theater. Dance-dramas of Japan. Presented by Albert B. Gins. At the Metropolitan Opera House. Much Ado About...
...The serious plot wins Hero's vindication by more tomfoolery, as Dogberry and the Watch unwittingly catch the criminals...
...At the Lunt-Fontanne Theater...
...The production, under his direction, matches his quality...
...Beatrice jests about it for the sake of the indelicacy...
...they turn from the romantic make-believe to welcome true love...
...George Rose, as Dogberry, leads the tomfoolery...
...Let these men be bound...
...After the Soviet tiger-lilies, a garden of fragrant sweet peas...
...Much Ado may be called a romantic satire on romance...
...What she and Benedick scorn is not love, but the artificial jargon that sometimes masks and sometimes passes for love...
...Through the 19th century, it was deemed a starring role for the Beatrice: Ada Rehan, Mod-jeska...
...Dogberry emphasizes: "Let them be opinioned...
...Presented by the Cambridge Drama Festival...
...Claire Luce's New York effort, in 1952...
...And here, out of nothing, appears the god of love...
...This playful deception leads them to true love...
...Beatrice, for all her wit, is no mere love-struck Rosalind...
...Its serious plot involves Hero in an arranged match with Claudio, until Claudio, falsely persuaded of Hero's faithlessness, rejects her at the altar...
...Directed by John Gielgud...
...One of my one-volume Shakespeares comments that the play is "very varied and agreeable, but for all that, as it turns out, much ado about nothing...
...And here, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theater, is a superb production of a delightful play...
...A genuine treat...
...I wonder why it isn't shown more often...
...Don't miss him and Margaret Leighton as the couple that moves through mischief to true love...
...But John Gielgud—at Stratford in 1950, London in 1952, and now at last in New York— reminds us that the Benedick is also a rich role, in a play bountiful in excitement, wit and beauty...
...How Queen Elizabeth would have laughed at Shaw!—and enjoyed the bantering in Much Ado...
...broke that spell: It lasted four performances...
...Mala-prop...
...In London a dozen years ago Harold Hobson, commenting on three productions of Much Ado, said: "In the first, I have forgotten the Benedick...
...Sets by Mariano Andreu fold in and out, converting a garden into a church or a bedroom balcony, with swift flow of action...
...With music westernized and pace quickened, this group presents dance-drama sketches in the traditional patterns and costumes, in successive turns of colorful beauty...
...in the second, the Beatrice...
...THE NEW SEASON, which usually starts with a few feeble and fumbling plays, has this year opened with two blossomings of delight...
...Yeats has said "Where there is nothing there is God...
...Their interplay is always varied and constantly delightful...
...Yet truly the play suggests that to be opinioned is to be bound...
...and above all Ellen Terry, sparkled as "the sauciest, most piquant madcap" Shakespeare ever drew...
...It is amusing to note that Bernard Shaw, in a strange mood of Victorian nice-Nellyism, objected to the wit of Beatrice, as having a "subject which a really witty woman never jests about, because it is too serious a matter to be made light of without indelicacy...
...The current production gives us the fourth possibility: Both performances will long be remembered...
...Margaret Leighton, with personal charm and many fetching turns of arch behavior, makes Beatrice almost outshine the Benedick...
...In this, I shall forget both...
...This casual dismissal overlooks Shakespeare's depth...
...Behind Shakespeare's comedy one always finds serious thought...
...Instead of the loud excitement of recent Russian groups, they come with a whisper of ancient cultured ways, and at times a gentle modern mischief...
...one should keep not merely one's body but one's judgment free...
...They offer a delicate entertainment, to be savored like a cordial, not a cocktail...
...Much Ado About Nothing...
...Next night came John Gielgud in Much Ado About Nothing, and every time I see Shakespeare's wittiest comedy...
...By William Shakespeare...
...Tangled with this is the schemed attraction of the other couple, whose friends jokingly arrange to have Benedick overhear them say that Beatrice loves him, and Beatrice, that Benedick loves her...
...John Gielgud, our generation's greatest Hamlet, takes with consummate ease the livelier lines of Benedick...
...The first of these is the company of Japanese women at the Met...
...When the sexton says, of the conspirators against Hero...
...And the name of Benedick, who had sworn to remain a bachelor, has become the byword for a married man...
...In his blundering use of the language, Dogberry is an absurd predecessor of Mrs...
...For while the play grows out of nothing, out of two things—Hero's guilt, and the other couple's love—that did not exist, it grows into something richer...
...Gielgud has said he will not perform it again...
Vol. 42 • September 1959 • No. 35
