Much Ado About Nothing comes to life at the Bodleian Library

Benedick snaps at Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing: “I would my horse had the speed of your tongue.” Often described as being amongst the most popular of all Shakespeare’s comic creations, the couple quarrel all the way to the altar as they conduct a spirited relationship of mutual resistance.

Much Ado is the choice for this year’s outdoor Oxford visit by the Shakespeare’s Globe theatre company, which, as in previous years, has set up a stage in the Bodleian Library’s Old Schools Quadrangle: it’s a Playhouse Plays Out event. The Globe’s artistic director Dominic Dromgoole knows the space well, for he ran the Oxford Stage Company from offices just down the road in George Street before he moved to the Globe.

“We first began touring in 2007, the year after I went to the Globe,” he explains. “But we’d already been thinking about it before then – it was partly because the Oxford Stage Company was a touring company, so touring was in my blood. It was also because I knew that’s what they did 400 years before – the Globe company did regularly tour out of London, it was part of their psyche and their make-up. I wanted to recapture some of that original energy and excitement.

“But touring was something of an experiment. We had no idea that it would become so massive, travel so far and wide and draw such big audiences. It’s wonderful to use spaces like the Bodleian where there’s a very specific historical resonance: it’s such a joy to be in that profoundly Shakespearean space, with James I high up above you on one side and the Earl of Pembroke sculpted in heavy brass on the other side. You just feel the presence of history very, very strongly. It has become a key venue for us.”

We are talking a few minutes before Much Ado begins the first performance of its current run. The venue is the vast walled garden of Fulham Palace, former home to the Bishops of London. As jets on their final approach to Heathrow scream distractingly low overhead every 90 seconds or so, Dominic adds: “The Bodleian has a lovely acoustic. The words clatter round the walls in an appealing way and it’s great for the actors to be able to relish the language in that space.”

Presumably places like the Bodleian quad and Fulham Palace would have been among the grander venues visited by the Globe’s original touring company?

“Indeed,” Dominic agrees. “There was great variety: one night you’d be performing in a pub courtyard like the Golden Cross in Cornmarket Street. Or perhaps you’d be in a grand person’s house, playing in beautiful candlelight, surrounded by people in Elizabethan or Jacobean bling. Another night, you might get into some terrible fight with members of the audience!

“I think it was all very kick and scramble, it was very rough and ready. The cast size would change night by night. They’d suddenly go down from 12 to eight people, then zoom back up again. So people were constantly being given new tasks, new props, new costumes, new lines to learn. They were pushed onto the stage and told to get on with it.”

What, I ask Dominic, appeals to him particularly about Much Ado?

• Beatrice who will be played by Emma Pallant as she was in last year’s production of Much Ado About Nothing

“I think it’s beautifully elegant and delightfully light. It rehearses very important themes that were always troubling Shakespeare – the relationships between the sexes and about how men and women spar and negotiate space around each other. Above all, Much Ado is gentle and kind – people say it’s Chekhovian, but that might not be quite right because Chekhov has got quite a different mindset.

“But there is a darkness to the play as well – the plot of Don John is very dark. But it’s all wrapped in this gentle, English warmth – it’s much more an English play, not an Italian play. All that makes it very attractive to me.”

A few years ago a Globe Much Ado was shown in cinemas nationwide. But Oxford isn’t getting this same production.

“We always reinvent for our small-scale tours,” Dominic explains. “The touring format hasn’t changed since we started – we use eight actors in all and include a lot of actor-musicianship: the actors are also the band. We concentrate on very accessible storytelling and very strong use of Shakespeare’s language. The job is to tell the story and make it come alive – we try not to put a big slant on the play, or do anything very interpretive.”

Where & When
Much Ado About Nothing continues at the Bodleian Library until August 2
Tickets oxfordplayhouse.com or 01865 305305