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Like many football match, Lots of score about nothing is a game of two contrasting halves. At the beginning, these are all smooth movements, an agile legs of legs and clever team maneuvers to bring to the longtime partners Beatrice and Benedick to admit their real feelings. And then – BAM! – Grave manager and mood changes in an instant. It is therefore perfectly logical for the director Michael Longhurst to define his new RSC production in the world at a high -cotane of professional football.
Here, the public sit down to the indistinct songs of an invisible crowd, delirious after the victory of the Messina FC. The men come back, not from the battle, but from Conquest on the field, including Don Pedro, the director of the team and Claudio, the man of the match, having scored a last -minute crucial goal. Having Giddy on Glory, they come out of the stadium, visible at the back of the set of Jon Bausor, and in a media and management maelstrom. Among the crowd is the easy to find Peter Forbes Leonato (here the owner of the club), his sweet daughter hero (Eleanor Worthington-Cox), with whom Daniel Adeosun, Naive Claudio of Daniel Adeosun, Claudio falls spectacularly in love, and Beatrice of Freema AGYEMA, a sports commentator with a sharp Tong.
It is an intelligent concept that launches Shakespeare's gentleness comedy in a contemporary setting, where celebrities appreciate brilliant lifestyles but are subject to an instant online judgment. Claudio's professed dedication to Hero and his hideous public rejection become even more extreme, with each movement in difficulty on countless cameras and phones, and social media is shaping the hero (abusive comments are projected around the auditorium). The images that deceive Claudio thinking that her unfaithful sweetheart is digitally changed.
This has a large part of the meaning, stressing how, four centuries, there is still a strong sequence of misogyny in public life and how speed is asserting itself in the world of sport. Adeosun and Worthington-Cox convincing as painfully inexperienced young people caught in a world that prepares them for life.
The parameter also supports those who are found on the edges of all Hoopla. Nick's funny and friendly Benedick deploys Laddish jokes like Armor. His relief, when he can abandon him, is palpable: he emerges, radiating with the pool pleasure on stage where he plunged to avoid detection while listening to his friends. AGYEMAN's trees strongly suggest that Béatrice is a woman for whom determined independence has become a fragile habit.
But there is a clumsiness in the evening – a feeling of stretching for effect. In places, it is as if the concept carried the drama, rather than the reverse. The characters are lost and part of the comedy is overestimated, feeling staged rather than a natural consequence of the situations of the characters (Beatrice hiding behind a statue in a compromising position being an example). In football language, there are too many heavy touches, with the result that you notice the effort, rather than the result. Meanwhile, this pool on stage, as fun as it is, forces a large part of the action to the scene, removing performance and making audibility for a problem.
A large game plan, lightning lightning and cracking performance. But it looks like one of these matches with many shots on the target and where all players work hard but the result is elusive.
★★★ ☆☆
At May 24, rsc.org.uk
