Zoë Wanamaker
on
Beatrice
National Theatre
Opened at the Olivier Theatre, London on 18 December 2007
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Designed by Vicki Mortimer (set) and Dinah Collin (costume)
With Simon Russell Beale as Benedick, Oliver Ford Davies as Leonato, Susannah Fielding as Hero, Daniel Hawksford as Claudio, and Julian Wadham as Don Pedro
Shakespeare wrote Much Ado About Nothing between 1598 and 1599, as he was approaching the midpoint of his career. Chronologically, it nestles between the history plays Henry IV and Henry V. It is one of his best and most popular comedies, embracing elements of a romcom with meditations on love, honour and shame, and a shockingly sudden lurch into melodrama.
There’s a pun in the title: in Shakespeare’s day ‘nothing’ was pronounced noting, i.e. overhearing, or eavesdropping. Thus, on the one hand, Benedick and Beatrice are tricked into confessing their love for each other; and on the other, Claudio is fooled into rejecting his beloved Hero at the altar. Balthasar has some fun with the word before his song: ‘Note this before my notes: / There’s not a note of mine that’s worth the noting’ [2.3]. And, less relevantly perhaps, the word was also Elizabethan slang for a vagina.
Much Ado is rich with thematic echoes of other plays. The apparently motiveless villain Don John can be seen as a precursor to Iago. The falsely accused Hero is declared to be dead, but comes ‘miraculously’ back to life once her man has repented. Hermione follows the same path, with astonishing theatricality, in The Winter’s Tale. And Beatrice and Benedick, the feisty antagonists whose journey through the play ends in love and marriage, have much in common with Kate and Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew.
The Hero/Claudio plot is believed to have been inspired by sixteenth-century Italian literary sources. However, Benedick and Beatrice, and the malapropping buffoon Dogberry, are Shakespeare’s inventions. Beatrice is one of his most captivating creations. During the opening scenes she parades a sharp, cynical wit, much of it at the expense of Benedick. As the play unfolds it gives way to amusing vulnerability. The shock of falling in love makes her unwell: ‘I am exceeding ill… I am stuffed, cousin, I cannot smell’ [3.4]. The character touches new depths with her passionate support for the wronged Hero in the church scene. No sooner has she declared her love to Benedick than she challenges him to kill his friend Claudio – and threatens to desert him if he refuses [4.1].
In 1968 I was cast as Friar Francis by the RSC. I played him young and ardent, received good notices, and felt pretty pleased with myself. But when the production toured to San Francisco I learned a valuable lesson. In California at the end of the 1960s it was rare to enter a bar where drinks were not served by topless girls, and the funky aroma of marijuana was everywhere. The Friar has a long wait before he comes on, and one evening I indulged in a small spliff. Just a wee one. The result was a revelation. My performance of the church scene felt superb, rich with interior monologue. My mind’s eye flashed back to Helen Mirren, who was playing Hero, as a five year-old laughing on her swing in the sunshine. She was being pushed by Sebastian Shaw (Leonato) and his adoration was palpable. It made his present reviling of her so much the more painful to witness. At the end as we walked off into the wings, I asked Alan Howard (Benedick) if he’d noticed anything different about my performance, expecting him to shower me with superlatives. But all he said was: ‘A bit slow.’
I interviewed Zoë Wanamaker at her home in Islington in December 2013. By then her initial concern about being past the age to play Beatrice had been allayed by the huge success of the production, and also by the recent casting of Vanessa Redgrave in the part, aged seventy-six, opposite the eighty-two-year-old James Earl Jones. You’re never too old…
Julian Curry: You and Simon Russell Beale were quite a lot older than Beatrice and Benedick are normally cast. One critic wrote, rather uncharitably, that you were into the Horlicks and Radox time of life. But another said that the age of the actors actually added pleasure and point to the piece. Did you find that?
Zoë Wanamaker: I think Nick Hytner’s casting was brilliant. Somebody once said to me: ‘Oh, you’ll never play Cleopatra.’ And it affected my whole career psyche, thinking I wouldn’t ever be cast as that kind of woman. So to be asked to play Beatrice was wonderful. At first I was worried, thinking the part needed somebody younger, but Nick persuaded me that we were the right age.
How so?
These two people are very bright, particularly Beatrice who has wonderful wit, and finds no match in the company she normally keeps. There is nobody who has her irony, her sense of humour or her self-deprecation. The household in which Beatrice lives is chauvinistic and part of a hierarchical society. Her cousin Hero is rich, young, innocent and ready to be married off, which was the normal thing. That’s the background to Beatrice’s domestic life.
You yourself got married relatively recently, didn’t you.
Yes, so I recognised something personal about Beatrice, because for years I never wanted to get married to anybody who wasn’t perfect. Of course there is no such thing as perfection, but from what I’d seen of some marriages I would rather be single, and I’d got to a stage in my mid-life when I was quite content to be by myself and just turn into a juicy old lady, and that would be that. Therefore I understood where Beatrice was coming from, and I think Simon maybe felt the same – never finding the right person, so it’s better simply to be on your own.
What period was the production?
It was kind of Elizabethan, but never specific. We had long frocks.
Set in Sicily?
Yes. The lighting was very warm. There was a flagstone floor, and we had a pool on the stage.
Tell me how Nick worked.
He cut the text brilliantly, and changed certain words. For instance, we lost some of Beatrice’s very tricky early stuff like ‘My uncle’s fool, reading the challenge, subscribed for Cupid and challenged him at the bird-bolt’ [1.1]. Thank God!
Yes, you’d want to read the footnotes for that!
It’s very difficult. Maybe the Elizabethans would have understood it, but I couldn’t make head nor tail. And Nick was absolutely right: if the audience doesn’t hook on to the language in the first ten minutes you might as well shoot yourself, because you have to engage with them immediately. If it’s too complicated for them to follow, there’s no point, you’ve lost them. I think about 250 lines were edited.
You mean cut out?
Cut or rearranged. For instance, in the church scene [4.1], Don Pedro calls Hero a ‘stale’, which means a whore. He said ‘whore’ instead, so the audience would understand immediately without having to go ‘What’s that?’ It trips the brain… like a horse shying at a jump. With little changes like that, the language flows better, there are no potholes and bumps making things hard for comprehension.
You didn’t have any trouble from Shakespeare purists?
I can’t remember. I don’t read reviews, so I’ve no idea whether they picked that up or not.
In another recent production a character’s sex was changed. Leonato had a sister instead of a brother.
I believe Cheek by Jowl did something like that. I’m sad I never saw it, because I feel it was lovely. I don’t mind if it makes sense of the piece.
The Olivier is a big theatre for what is basically a domestic play. Was that a problem?
No.
It’s a huge space.
It’s a fantastic space. I don’t find that theatre difficult. And Nick’s production was so brilliant the way he kept it moving. The set was on a revolve which made everything fluid, one scene followed another as the revolve was still going round, so it was all seamless and beautifully orchestrated.
Fiona Shaw said that Beatrice is by far the most wonderful woman in Shakespeare because she’s very ordinary, very witty, full of kindness and speaks beautiful things. Does that sound right to you?
Pretty good.
I thought ‘full of kindness’ was surprising.
Full of kindness? Yes, I think so. She sees human frailty for what it is, and she’s a bit of a cynic. But she has a great heart and understanding of the world – except for herself, as you discover when she overhears Hero talking about her. She has wonderful sympathy and love for Hero. And kindness? Probably yes. In the church scene you have it in spades.
Beatrice is not a big part, is it.
No. That’s the bitch of it. Because Benedick has everything with the audience.
Did you feel it’s underwritten?
Very much so.
Can you specify? In what ways do you think Shakespeare should have given Beatrice more?
There are very few scenes when you actually see Beatrice and Benedick together, maybe five, and they’re mostly short. But Benedick speaks to the audience all the time, so immediately they’re on his side. Whereas Beatrice doesn’t, that’s what I missed most. Just like Petruchio in The Shrew, he has soliloquies, but Katherine doesn’t. So they’re both difficult to play because they don’t have any jokes to the audience, they don’t communicate with them, and to that extent the woman’s voice is chopped off. But you feel you’ve got to be funny, so you invent stuff, which I hate doing. I’m not good at that kind of stuff. [Zoë makes inverted commas with her fingers.] Yes. Stuff. ‘Schtick’…
Schtick, okay.
I’m not good at that. Everything has to come from the reality of the situation. So yes, I felt frustrated that Beatrice doesn’t have as much as Benedick, who has wonderful comedic riffs. He’s a kind of jester for Don Pedro, that’s why they like him around.
Nonetheless, Beatrice makes her own very strong mark. She’s a queen bee.
I suppose because she has a liberated spirit, she’s an independent animal. She has no mother, no father. She is beholden to Leonato, but she’s a free person with no family except her cousin and uncle.
Did you make up a backstory about that?
There were various backstories that I invented for myself. Maybe my mother died in childbirth, Beatrice was left parentless and was brought into Leonato’s family, and has grown up with Hero all her life. So the story is to some extent one of abandonment and survival.
She seems very much a social creature. She thrives on company, doesn’t she.
Yeah, yeah.
She sparks off people and situations.
Yes.
Could you imagine her by herself, what she would do when she was alone?
I think she reads a lot. I also imagine her to be one of those wonderful women who can do everything. You can put them in the Arctic and they’ll manage to make a fire; you could put them in the middle of a desert and they’d be able to keep themselves cool. I think Beatrice is one of those women. I know some, and envy them tremendously. They’re just great survivors.
In terms of the family set-up, Hero is Leonato’s only child and therefore will inherit his fortune.
That’s right. I don’t think Beatrice comes with much of a dowry.
Being adopted, you don’t have the same kudos.
Not at all.
She wouldn’t have a job, would she?
No. But she’d be part of the household.
She’d be given an allowance? To buy a new pair of socks?
Yes. I don’t think she’d be made poor by it. She’d be dressed okay.
What did you look like?
Usually when I do a play, for research I go straight to an art gallery, or look at photographic or art books. I go to the period and see what’s going on politically, what’s going on socially, or what inventions happened. What things smell like, the atmosphere the play is set in. I was looking at Italian paintings, and saw one by Titian where he uses this gorgeous colour, sort of reddish-brown, copper-brown, quite beautiful. I thought she should have a mass of hair that you can’t really do anything with, it goes frizzy if you brush it. It’s a sort of soft curl – angels are depicted with this kind of hair. You know what I mean?
I know exactly.
It was hair that she doesn’t dress much, she just puts it up or plaits it or something simple like that. The dresses, the costumes were beautiful. Mine was blue I think, blue-grey. I wish I had a photograph.
Elizabethan-ish?
Perhaps a bit later, the waists were slightly higher.
The production opened with a family dinner party, is that right?
No, breakfast. A table is laid out in the garden with grapes and cheese and bread. Ursula and the servants are there. Leonato sits down and has some coffee, or I think there might have been wine. The messenger comes in with a letter and gives it to Leonato, who reads it out. So there’s excitement. And Beatrice asks the messenger ‘I pray you, is Signor Mountanto returned from the wars or no?’
Why does she call Benedick ‘Signor Mountanto’?
It’s a joke.
Why?
She talks about him because he’ll be arriving any minute, he’s not three leagues off. And his reputation as an entertainer and joker is spoken by the messenger, who says ‘O, he’s returned, and as pleasant as ever he was.’ Immediately she picks on that and sends him up. She turns her feelings into humour; being funny hides what she is thinking. That’s the way her brain works. She knows she’s clever, there’s no one who can really match her apart from Benedick. He’s the only one who can give her a good run for her money. He obviously gives her brain food.
So there’s no particular reason for choosing the word ‘Mountanto’?
It’s probably a reference to mounting women, which he’s known for – or says he’s known for. That’s another thing. I think Benedick could be all talk and no action, because perhaps he feels the same way about relationships. As soon as he comes in, he makes some joke about Hero’s mother, it’s a joke for the blokes, and they go ‘Oh, ha-ha-ha!’ We’re in an unbalanced society, a sexist society. But Beatrice has a great first line to him: ‘I wonder that you will still be talking, Signor Benedick: nobody marks you’, which is terribly funny, it’s just the best. Then Benedick tries to get the women involved. He says ‘But it is certain I am loved of all ladies, only you excepted – ’, so leaving Beatrice somewhat out in the cold – ‘and I would I could find in my heart that I had not a hard heart, for truly I love none.’ Then she gets them back on her side with ‘A dear happiness to women! They would else have been troubled with a pernicious suitor. I thank God, and my cold blood, I am of your humour for that: I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than hear a man swear he loves me.’ Benedick’s response is ‘So some gentleman or other shall scape a predestinate scratched face’, which is very aggressive. Beatrice is plain rude after that, and they resort to basic insults. They manage to pull each other apart just like that, in a few lines. They’re a millimetre away from humiliating themselves, both of them. Then Benedick walks off, and brings the whole thing to an abrupt end. Beatrice feels this is not the behaviour of a gentleman, but it’s typical of Benedick, and she’ll get her own back. She says ‘You always end with a jade’s trick: I know you of old.’ This is the first encounter you have with them, at the very top of the play. You get the relationship, with a hint of what maybe happened between them in the past, and who resorts to what kind of language. It’s brilliantly written, but too short. It’s like a little match being sparked.
A critic wrote about you: ‘She is sour and venomous when she speaks of Benedick, not the usual merry quipster.’ Is that your recollection? And if so, was it sincere or a kind of carapace?
Was I sour and venomous? No, I wasn’t.
It doesn’t sound likely.
No, that’s a critic’s point of view. I think there was a past involvement which he ran away from, and they’re both hurt by it, but particularly Beatrice who was humiliated by it. So when they meet again there is still that anger.
So there was a romantic past?
I think so.
Did you sleep together?
I don’t know. I told Simon there was a secret. We agreed not to discuss it, which I thought was best. But I feel there was an encounter which might have been a sexual one, or a promise of one that never happened because he ran away.
He ran scared of the involvement.
I think so.
Do you think the audience was aware of you and Benedick having a past?
I don’t know. It doesn’t bother me whether they got it or not. The great thing about art is that everybody has their own interpretation of what they see.
I’ll try that last question in a different form. There’s verbal jousting between you, a kind of sexy mating dance. How much of it is for the two of you, and how much is peacocking for other people?
It’s a bit of both. They can’t resist sparring. There’s an instinctive magnetic attraction between them, because they both have these brains. Benedick is the only person she can intellectually play with, he’s the one she can get some satisfaction out of having a fight with. But there’s also an undercurrent as far as Beatrice is concerned because the last time they met was not a happy time. There was a lot left unsaid. And Benedick makes silly jokes which irritate the fuck out of Beatrice. She finds him arrogant, and his wit is always at the expense of other people. He’s just a bloke at those times. So there’s a kind of love/hate relationship going on – well, it’s not so much hate, it’s disdain. She has a disdainful attitude because of the way he’s using his masculinity.
That word is used a lot about Beatrice by other characters: ‘disdain’, or ‘disdainful’.
Yes. He calls her ‘Lady Disdain’, doesn’t he.
And it’s used in the gulling scene [3.1]. Does that seem accurate? Is Beatrice disdainful? Their relationship is complicated. In that first scene she’s disdainful of him because of the unfinished business which was never resolved or talked about. She felt he was a coward, and that made her disdainful. You know – how many situations have you been in when somebody promised to meet you and didn’t turn up, and never even spoke about it. Or you lend a friend money and they say they’ll give it back to you in six months, six months go past and when you see them again there’s no mention of the money. They don’t say ‘Sorry, I haven’t got it’, or ‘I haven’t forgotten, I’ll give it to you next week.’ It’s not even mentioned. So you start getting pissed off with that person; you may still like them, but you become disdainful of them because you’ve lost faith in them. They haven’t behaved like a friend. It was that same feeling, as far as I was concerned.
So disdain is what she directs towards Benedick, not the world at large?
Exactly.
Act 2, Scene 1. There’s a long section when Beatrice goes on about never marrying.
Mind if I digress for a moment?
Go ahead.
When I left drama school I didn’t want to do Shakespeare. It was the seventies, and new writing was the thing. But once I joined the RSC in ’78 it was like going to Mecca. The intimidation you felt when you walked into the theatre and saw the huge photographs of all those wonderful actors!
A bit daunting.
Daunting to be on that hallowed ground. My dad [Sam Wanamaker] had been there and I’d seen shows, so I understood Shakespeare instinctively. It was the detail I didn’t know about. I had to ask David Suchet to help me with iambic pentameter cos I didn’t really get it. Then I had some sessions with John Barton which opened, for me, a whole world. But still there’s always a place where I get lost in a Shakespeare play – or any play actually. [Laughs.] With Beatrice I got lost particularly in this bit we’re talking about, just before the party scene, so I went away with the voice coach [at the National] Jeannette Nelson. She helped me physically with breathing, but also with the use of language: which words Beatrice uses – when, how, what for, where – and it clarified so much for me. Just to listen to the music, her choice of words, and not to think about the other stuff, but just to listen.
What do you mean by ‘the other stuff’?
Well, the subtext. I do believe that the same psychological backstory can apply to a part in Shakespeare as in any other play. But in that case, simply concentrating on the words that she picks out elucidated so much for me, made it much easier.
Can you give an example of that?
At the beginning they start about Count John and she makes a joke saying ‘How tartly that gentleman looks! I can never see him but I am heart-burned an hour after.’ Which I think is very funny, but you have to select the word ‘tartly’. Then I got stuck because Beatrice seems full of contradiction, her mind goes all over the place, and that’s why I decided she was gonna get drunk. She goes into this whole riff about husbands.
Go on.
Leonato says ‘You may light on a husband that hath no beard.’ And she goes ‘What should I do with him? Dress him in my apparel and make him my waiting gentlewoman? He that hath a beard is more than a youth, and he that hath no beard is less than a man; and he that is more than a youth is not for me, and he that is less than a man, I am not for him.’ She carries on like that. And it’s all antithesis, which is a word I had never heard until I went to Stratford, and something else I learnt from John Barton. But I had to learn to breathe, particularly with this, and take time to set up her gags. That speech was difficult because I had to be truthful, but at the same time remember that she’s playing the fool… not the fool, but she’s now the entertainer, she’s being the clever clogs.
It’s easy for us to think ‘the lady doth protest too much’. What do you reckon?
I believe her. At that stage she’s perfect. This is where I took a lot from my own experience.
Let’s move on to the dance scene [2.1]. Here’s another quote: ‘Zoë Wanamaker grows looser of tongue and feistier of spirit under the influence of an ever present goblet of red wine.’
Oh God, critics! Have you seen the picture of a critic my dad gave me? [Zoë produces a cartoon of an automated critic wearing a dunce’s hat, which is also a funnel, stuck on his head and his tongue sticking out.]
Lovely!
They’re referring to the party scene, as we called it. As I mentioned, I decided that Beatrice got drunk.
Just in that scene?
Yes. It’s a party when the men have been away at war, they come back and there’s a hell of a celebration. The whole household, everybody gets roaring drunk. But you know what happens in Italy, it’s a happy pissed. It’s not people getting wrecked and throwing up everywhere. There’s a jollity to it. So yeah, Beatrice and Benedick both get more and more sloshed at this party.
She wasn’t an alcoholic, then?
No.
Did you wear a mask?
I don’t remember wearing a mask. No, the women didn’t, the men did.
She says to Benedick, Will you not tell me who you are?
Yes, he’s got a mask on.
But you know who he is, presumably?
Yes. Yes.
So he sees you quite plainly, and you know who he is in spite of the mask.
Yep.
At one point you say to Benedick, still pretending you don’t know it’s him and you’re talking about a third person, ‘I would he had boarded me’, which is very saucy. It’s quite a sexy thing for her to say, don’t you think?
It is. But you know Leonato says earlier ‘By my troth, niece, thou wilt never get a husband, if thou be so shrewd of thy tongue.’ And Antonio adds ‘In faith, she is too curst.’ She’s being constantly told that she’ll never get a husband. These messages that she’s not fit to be anybody’s wife must hurt, but it’s confusing and complicated because she looks around and doesn’t see marriage as anything particularly desirable. In that exchange when she says about Benedick ‘They laugh at him and beat him. I am sure he is in the fleet: I would he had boarded me’, he responds ‘When I know the gentleman, I will tell him what you say.’ And she goes ‘Do, do. He’ll but break a comparison or two on me, which, peradventure not marked or laughed at, strikes him into a melancholy, and then there’s a partridge wing saved, for the fool will eat no supper that night.’ They are out to score points and hurt each other, and entertain others while doing so.
They’re out to entertain others while doing so?
Yes. Because they’re surrounded, the banter is observed.
It’s for public consumption.
It’s for public consumption as well as being barbed. As far as Beatrice is concerned, it’s towards him. It’s an outward thing, but she knew exactly what she was saying.
But ‘I would he had boarded me’ – does she really mean it?
No, she doesn’t, no. Well, maybe she does, deep down. In the sense that I was there, I was waiting, but nothing happened. I felt it was a hurt remark. But it’s from past history, she probably hasn’t seen him in a year. I played it so the audience could make up their own minds.
Later on you come back with Claudio and Benedick goes wildly over the top, saying to Don Pedro ‘Will your grace command me any service to the world’s end?’ And all that stuff about escaping from you.
We’re both well away by this time. And the way Simon played it, he was really drunk.
Don Pedro then says ‘You have lost the heart of Signor Benedick.’ And you have the revealing line, ‘Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.’
There’s the backstory. It’s self-explanatory.
Later on she says ‘I may sit in the corner and cry “Heigh-ho for a husband”.’ One would like to say: Make your mind up, do you want one or not?
But she’s quite happy. As she said earlier, her idea of heaven would be to meet St Peter, and ‘He shows me where the bachelors sit, and there live we as merry as the day is long’ – I’ll be with the guys and have a good chat.
Oh, I see. Perhaps I misread the line. I thought ‘I may sit in the corner and cry “Heigh-ho for a husband”’ was longing for one.
I don’t believe so. I think she’s summing up herself.
A fig for a husband!
Yes. Cos if I can’t have something decent, what’s the point?
‘Hath your grace ne’er a brother like you? Your father got excellent husbands, if a maid could come by them,’ she says to Don Pedro. She’s quite a tease, isn’t she?
Yes, she is. She’s being naughty.
Drunk and naughty.
I think so.
Finally, Beatrice has a wonderful line, ‘There was a star danced, and under that was I born.’
Such a beautiful thing to say. Her heart is so big, which I think is part of what Fiona said. It’s full of mixed emotions, that line. There’s optimism and a recognition of her nature, she knows she’s clever and special. But it’s also quite sad. Perhaps her mother had died in childbirth, and she was lucky to be alive. At the same time there’s loneliness, a deep loneliness.
Immediately afterwards, Leonato seems to invent a reason for Beatrice to go. Why was that?
I don’t know. Probably to set up the gulling scene.
That may have been Shakespeare’s reason, but what was Leonato’s? Were you misbehaving?
It could have been.
Being excessively drunk, letting the side down?
Exactly, yes. A bit embarrassing. I do remember being rather naughty with Claudio, I think I tweaked his bottom. So it went a little too far.
Next is Benedick’s gulling scene [2.3], during which he fell into the pool. Beatrice appears briefly to call him in to dinner. You find Simon dripping wet, which must have been a sight to behold.
Yes. I pretended not to notice.
Oh, did you?
Because it was ludicrous and childish and he deserved to fall into the water and be dripping wet cos he’s an arse. A dumb schmuck. He tries to be nice, and I was just kind of dismissive.
Much funnier not to react.
But he calls her ‘Fair Beatrice’ and says ‘I thank you for your pains.’ It’s uncharacteristic of Benedick to be so kind and gentle to her, which she finds confusing. When she sees him wet and looking like an idiot, she doesn’t understand what’s going on. So there’s also a question in her mind.
Act 3, Scene 1. You eavesdrop on Hero and Ursula talking about you.
Hero says Beatrice runs ‘like a lapwing’, which is a fantastic image. Lapwings hop with their wings slightly open, they bob about. But it’s the first time Beatrice has heard Hero speaking so freely. She never says a bad word about anybody, and to listen to her at last speaking her mind, is amazing.
Is she really speaking her mind?
Oh yes, I think she is.
She’s setting you up, surely.
Setting me up, but there’s a certain amount of truth in what she says. Beatrice hears some awful things that are a complete shock to her. It begins with ‘Benedick loves Beatrice so entirely’ – which is extraordinary. But the thing that really struck me was when Hero says ‘She cannot love.’ That has never crossed her mind.
But Nature never fram’d a woman’s heart
Of prouder stuff than that of Beatrice;
Disdain and scorn ride sparkling in her eyes,
Misprising what they look on, and her wit
Values itself so highly that to her
All matter else seems weak; she cannot love,
Nor take no shape nor project of affection,
She is so self-endeared.
Devastating.
To hear someone she knows so well say that is like a thunderbolt.
I imagine there can be a problem with this scene because it follows the Benedick gulling. So you’ve either got to do similar gags – if I may use that word – and make them work differently, or invent new ones. Can you tell me how it was staged, and where you hid?
There was a maid clearing up the mess, all the water left by Benedick. So I swapped hats with her, took her mop and pail and followed them around, mopping up while I listened – they pretending not to notice. In fact we had a very large girl playing the maid, so when I switched with her it was obviously really stupid.
Improbable.
At the end I had to lean with the mop to try and hear what they were saying, and just as they were leaving I fell in.
You overbalanced?
I overbalanced gently, not with flailing arms or anything like that. What they were saying was so shocking. ‘What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?’ comes out of that.
Wonderful!
What’s interesting is that this is the first time Beatrice goes into verse. Just for ten lines. And something else I learned from John Barton, is that in a soliloquy characters always speak the truth. It is simple, there are no jokes, it’s a complete revelation. And it was the most difficult speech in the play.
Really?
Because it’s a total change. I felt that falling in the pool was a baptism.
When Benedick was left alone he seemed a bit suspicious. He said ‘I should think this a gull, but that the white-bearded fellow speaks it’ [2.3]. But Beatrice doesn’t appear to have any doubts at all. She swallows everything she has overheard, hook, line and sinker, isn’t that so?
Yeah. What Hero said hits home. All her jokes cover the fact that she cannot love. Her heart has been caged and closed because she’s frightened to love. If she loves, she opens herself up, and that’s something she has guarded against all her life.
Her lines of verse at the end of the scene look rapturous.
I wouldn’t say rapturous. It’s amazement. When she says ‘Benedick, love on’, it’s like a fairy’s gone Ting! I would say something has happened to her.
She says ‘Stand I condemn’d for pride and scorn so much? / Contempt, farewell; and maiden pride, adieu!’ Does she actually change?
I think so.
She learns?
She opens herself up to it.
Let’s go on. Act 3, Scene 4. It’s early in the morning and Hero is getting ready for her wedding.
And Beatrice has a streaming cold.
For once we know exactly why!
Also the Chinese say a cold is about change.
Oh, do they really?
Yes. Which I liked a lot. So that, for me, was part of her reaction.
It must be fun to play that scene being miserable with a cold.
Yeah.
Did you ham it up a lot?
I did not ham it up a lot, Julian!
Did you sneeze much, or say ‘Good borrow, sweet Hero’?
I did say ‘Good borrow, sweet Hero.’ I probably sneezed a couple of times, two’s enough. Earlier on Hero says ‘My heart is exceeding heavy’, which is very telling, and not comedic.
Nobody knows why, do they, at that stage?
Nobody.
It’s a premonition?
I’ve played a few of Shakespeare’s second women, and I find their silences most interesting. And when they speak they have their own articulacy, sometimes with a kind of second sight. I’ve never played Perdita, but she has a beautiful, sweet, soft understanding of what’s happening, of another element.
On to the chapel scene [4.1]. Much Ado is a comedy with dark clouds.
It’s extraordinary. You think this is a light comedy and then suddenly – trip! It happens so fast.
For 250 lines Beatrice says hardly a word. What’s going on in her mind?
She’s in shock at what happens, at hearing Hero called a whore. She can’t speak, she can’t. It’s a totally male-dominated situation, and the horror just keeps going on. I read the other day about these two guys who murdered an officer with knives – do you remember? There was a witness who said she simply stood there and couldn’t believe what she was seeing. When you’re in those situations it is like somebody’s womb being cut out. The horror of it means she can’t speak.
You’re watching a train crash.
Yeah.
Finally, everybody else leaves and there’s the highly charged passage between Beatrice and Benedick. An intense mixture of love and fury.
It’s brilliant, the most moving scene to perform, and it changes the whole atmosphere. Until then you’d think that love doesn’t exist in the play. We were in the middle of the church and everything goes quiet after all the pandemonium, the shouting, crying and hysteria. Then there’s silence, and the truth comes out. It’s just so moving. The scene played itself. When Simon and I first rehearsed it we knew exactly what to do. I was sitting on a chair in front, and he was behind me. We did it without looking at each other. Afterwards, Nick said ‘I have no notes. I have nothing to say, let’s just leave it.’
To declare your love for each other in the very darkest part of the play – it’s wonderful playwriting.
It starts with Benedick: ‘Lady Beatrice, have you wept all this while?’ Which is just beautiful. Then Beatrice: ‘Yea, and I will weep awhile longer.’ – ‘I will not desire that.’ – ‘You have no reason, I do it freely.’ The text is all beautifully laid out.
With short lines.
They build and build and build.
Benedick talks about Hero having been wronged, and she says ‘Ah, how much might the man deserve of me that would right her!’ Which seems to imply some kind of repayment. What do you think she means?
It’s about love, honour, respect, whatever you like.
Why does she say ‘It is a man’s office, but not yours’?
I’m not sure.
Is it perhaps because Claudio is his friend, or because you’re afraid Benedick would be killed if they had a duel?
Maybe. Then the humour of these two falling off their high horses gives way to a scene of true love. They both show themselves to be loyal, courageous and passionate. Benedick attempts to comfort her after what’s just happened. He says ‘I do love nothing in the world so well as you.’ But even though they’re being deadly serious, they can’t help joking with each other. It happens despite their feelings. She keeps stopping herself. She replies ‘It were as possible for me to say I loved nothing so well as you, but believe me not, and yet I lie not, I confess nothing, nor I deny nothing. I am sorry for my cousin.’ There is humour in that. It’s up and down, and jagged.
What’s going on there? Is it because she lacks the words, or lacks the courage to say the words?
Well, she’s so upset that it’s not coming out properly.
But why is that? Is it because she’s distracted by her fury…
She’s distracted.
…about Claudio’s behaviour…
Yes.
…or because ‘I love you’ is such a difficult thing for her to say?
Yes.
Or both, do you think?
All of that. Because it’s so intimate.
‘I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest’ is about the only completely defenceless, unequivocal declaration she makes. Then two lines later she’s saying ‘Kill Claudio’. It shocks the hell out of Benedick, and the audience. Does it shock you too?
No.
Has she been manoeuvring towards that moment?
I don’t think she’s been manoeuvring, it just comes out.
And you’re not at all surprised to hear yourself say it?
No. ‘Kill Claudio’ does shock the audience. And it has a history of being laughed at. But I didn’t mind.
That’s nervous laughter, isn’t it?
I think so, anyway it didn’t happen often. The line’s a turning point. Beatrice asks Benedick to kill his best friend, and when he declines, her fury is unleashed. It opens up a whole stream from her: ‘Is ’a not approved in the height a villain, that hath slandered, scorned, dishonoured my kinswoman?’ Not only is she enraged by these other men for what they’ve done to her cousin, but Benedick will not see what a villain Claudio is. She tries to throw aside the love she has just confessed, feelings that were so difficult for her to admit. You’re right that ‘I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protest’ is the most extraordinary thing to say. But I believe that if Benedick hadn’t eventually agreed to challenge Claudio, she would never have spoken to him again.
Oh, really?
All the times she had put him down with wit and insults, she was allowing feelings of love for him to grow, and she must have realised how deep they were. The scorn and frustration in her next speeches are coloured by the love turning to anger.
She says ‘Oh, that I were a man!’ three times over.
Yeah. Yeah.
She’s in a magnificent rage.
She is, it’s fabulous.
Culminating with ‘I would eat his heart in the marketplace.’
She feels so impotent as a woman.
She says ‘manhood is melted into curtsies, valour into compliment’, which sounds rather as if she’s cutting his balls off, like Lady Macbeth challenging his manhood, goading him into action.
Because of her impotence, that’s what she’s feeling.
But is she also saying to Benedick: You’re not a man because you won’t do anything about it.
She’s on a riff at that point. I don’t think it’s anything to do with him. She’s hitting out so wildly that Benedick finds it impossible to interrupt. She pulls all men down, wishing again and again that she were a man.
So finally he agrees.
Eventually he manages to calm her down with ‘Think you in your soul the Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?’ which makes her stop and listen. And she answers, hoping the assurance will satisfy him, ‘Yea, as sure as I have a thought or a soul.’ That convinces Benedick. He agrees to challenge Claudio, and with his declaration, ‘Enough, I am engaged’, he takes over, becoming chivalrous, strong, different from the others. And this is the point when she allows herself to really fall in love, I think.
I see.
Beatrice and Benedick are both misfits, but thankfully they find each other. They have warmth and wit. They represent hope and love, and give the play its heart. It was important to feel that these two could love, in this otherwise harsh and cynical world.
Then you have a short scene in Act 5.
It’s delightful.
You still seem a bit spiky, keeping him at arm’s length.
Yes.
Is that surprising? Are you insecure in some way?
It’s partly shyness. Benedick tries to kiss her, which she avoids by talking and joking. But also she needs to know that he is carrying out his promise. At the end he asks ‘How doth your cousin?’ – ‘Very ill.’ – ‘And how do you?’ – ‘Very ill too.’
You’re ‘very ill’ because…?
Of Hero. Finally, as he tries to kiss her again, he says ‘Serve God, love me, and mend.’ It’s the most beautiful scene. I adore ‘Thou and I are too wise to woo peacefully.’ It’s a very honest scene.
And you’re alone on stage. It’s not for anybody else’s benefit, just the two of you.
Yes.
Which gives a different chemistry, doesn’t it.
Completely. Something has changed. There’s been a shift.
Into the last scene [5.4]. The first thing we hear is Benedick asking the Friar to marry you. We don’t know if he’s mentioned it to you or not. Do you feel at all taken for granted?
I think there is embarrassment, slight self-consciousness. But Benedick is brilliant, he does it with his constant humour, which can be such an endearing quality, and makes it okay. He says ‘Come, I will have thee; but, by this light I take thee for pity.’ And she comes back with ‘I would not deny you, but, by this good day, I yield upon great persuasion, and partly to save your life, for I was told you were in a consumption.’
Nice.
That’s the last remark she makes, and Benedick finally does kiss her.
Which gets a good reaction?
Yeah.
The audience must have loved that. It has been a tantrically slow build-up!
I suppose you could say that, yes.
In my edition ‘Peace! I will stop your mouth’ is given to Leonato, which seems odd. It must be Benedick’s line, surely.
It is Benedick.
After that, Claudio tells you to be careful because Benedick may be unfaithful unless you keep an eye on him. Do you take that seriously?
Hardly at all. But I’m not sure that his marriage to Hero is going to be a happy one. The thing about this play is there’s lust and there’s love.
Go on.
I think Claudio for Hero has hot young love, whereas Beatrice and Benedick have old love, it is deep brain love. That was a young man talking.
He doesn’t understand.
Not very bright, if he can be so stupid as to be taken in by that charade. I don’t think Beatrice has much time for him after that.
How was the finale? Did you join in the dance?
We did for a bit, yes. But ended up sitting on a bench talking and laughing, while the others danced.
There was still music, so the audience couldn’t hear what you were saying?
Exactly. We just chatted and shared a few jokes. You could see that these people were right for each other. They have a real understanding, a coming together of souls, of minds.
Can you sum up by telling me about Beatrice’s journey?
At the start, her relationship with Benedick was based on misunderstandings, fear and insecurities. They were both insecure, I think. Benedick pretending he had all these lovers, Beatrice thinking she could never get married. What’s more, Beatrice is in a very male-dominated society, which she resents and he is part of, so you’d assume they absolutely can’t get on. But the great thing about these characters is how they develop as the plot progresses. When you go into any play you’re looking for a character’s change or revelation, which makes them more true to life and is part of the audience’s satisfaction as well as the actor’s. These two people are changed for the better and the happier as a result of the gulling scenes.
Do you think she was waiting for him all the time, that she always knew he was the one, if only it could come out right?
It’s possible.
Or is that a bit soppy?
A little bit, yes, but it’s possible. Of all the people she might have a relationship with, it could only be him. And when it happens, a flower opens. Theirs is a marriage made in heaven because they’re so right, their spirits are so perfectly matched. That’s where Nick was so clever: the play is not about young people, it’s about mature people, people who have lived but are looking in the wrong directions. It’s the warmth and the wit of these two people, and the fact that they are misfits who thankfully find each other, that make it such a joyous play.
