[ATTENDED: November 14, 2013] Much Ado About Nothing
Despite all of my reading, I am fairly ignorant of Shakespeare. I’ve read or seen most of the big ones, but I don’t know a lot of his works first hand. As a young reader I realized that reading Shakespeare was hard—as, really, any play with dozens of characters tends to be. It’s not easy to keep character straight when there are no descriptors about them. So I more or less gave up on reading Shakespeare and decided I would watch him when I could.
When the Princeton University theater offered us tickets to see Much Ado About Nothing, it seemed a great opportunity to brush up.
This was a student production, and I have to complement all of the students on their wonderful performances. They never broke characters, and their Shakespearean dialogue was flawless (as far as I know). What I found interesting was that it took about fifteen minutes before I was absorbed in the dialogue and understood, well, about 45% of it. Well, maybe 60%. They did speak a little fast sometimes.
What was incredibly helpful about the dialogue was…the actors. Duh. But really, the language comes to life when you see people actually performing the lines (making Shakespeare’s bawdy jokes that much more bawdy). And while some of the performances seemed almost over the top, I have little doubt that that is how it was performed back in the day—why would they go for subtle when there’s jokes about sex? (more…)
I Just Read About That... 