Theater Abroad: Much Ado, with Garlic

Like many another old comedy, Much Ado About Nothing has become long of tooth, even longer in the playing, and short of run. So what to do with Much Ado?

Sir Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Tynan, who are director and literary manager of Britain’s National Theater, decided it needed a thorough overhaul. To thin out the verbal thickets, they called in Poet-Classicist Robert Graves, who made over 300 changes from obscure to understandable Elizabethan. To give the plot a new lift, they unleashed the talents of Director Franco Zeffirelli, whose earlier beatnik Hamlet had the hero intone, “To be or not to be—what the hell!”

For Much Ado, Zeffirelli decided to keep the setting in Sicily’s Messina but to update and garlic up the performance with farcical sight gags, snatches of Puccini, and Italian-accented iambics. Don John turns up with a twitch, Bene dick (Robert Stephens) in sunglasses and Don Pedro (Albert Finney) dangles his cigar as if he were a successful Mafia leader.

Predictably, some of the critics also wound up in a twitch over what one of them called the “tarting up” of the Bard. The Daily Mail found Graves’s play doctoring “impertinent and silly—never did a clever man make so public a fool of himself.” But the Observer, among others, decided it liked the prosciutto fine: “Not for years has the human substance of Shakespeare been refleeted like this.” The public apparently agreed. Last week, after a month in the repertory, the National Theater’s Much Ado was still selling out even the standing room back of the stalls.