I was stimulated to re-read my 30 year old dog-eared Penguin edition of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing by Watford Palace Theatre staging an all-female performance set in World War Two, with Dogberry turning into Captain Mainwaring and the watchmen into a patrol from Dad's Army!
Despite these modifications their reading of the text was conventional and the actors played their parts as you would expect. Much Ado is a comedy with some darker moments and though most of the jokes rely on some understanding of Elizabethan language and lifestyle (helpfully explained in the footnotes of this edition), arguably the play has a lot of relevance to the modern world. I see Beatrice and Benedict as a couple of hipsters of their time, leading their own independent lives in the way that suits them, ignoring the normal rules of society and wary of making any commitments to anyone else. The main story, the impending marriage of the much more conventional couple, Hero and Claudio, and the wicked plots that get in the way, seems to flow all around B and B, except that society gets them in the end, and so they too end up getting married, though Shakespeare drops some hints that this is what they really wanted all along. Altogether a fun play and a very enjoyable evening at that excellent venue, the Watford Palace!
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