[In the following excerpted review of the 2002/2003 Royal Shakespeare Company season at Stratford-upon-Avon, Jackson summarizes the major dramatic movements and principal character interpretations that made up Gregory Doran's generally well-received staging of Much Ado about Nothing.]

The first two plays in the Stratford season were cross-cast in the supporting roles but did not share the same principals: Harriet Walter (Beatrice) and Nicholas Le Prevost (Benedick) appeared only in Much Ado About Nothing, and Stuart Wilson and Sinead Cusack played only Antony and Cleopatra. Of the two productions, Doran's Much Ado was the more successful, A permanent (and very solid-looking) set showed the exterior of Leonato's villa stretching diagonally across and up the stage from the left-hand corner. The large porch, with a balcony reached by a flight of steps, dominated the center of the stage, while the downstage playing area represented the garden or a street, and the lighting on the warm sandstone evoked heat and Italian sunshine. For the garden scenes a trellis of greenery could be run across the stage in front of the house, and the chapel was represented by introducing an altar on the extreme left, a statue of the Virgin by the door, and rows of chairs to suggest the nave: the porch of the house now did duty as the entrance to the sacristy. Unlike [Kenneth] Branagh, Doran and his designer, Stephen Brimson Lewis, chose an urban rather than pastoral setting and indicated a specific time period as well. This was Sicily in the 1930s: Don John (Stephen Campbell-Moore) and Conrade (Ian Drysdale) wore the black shirts of fascisti, who might have been returning from the invasion of Abyssinia. I write “might have been” because there can be no exact parallel between the romantic military campaign in which Claudio has acquitted himself well and few have been lost with Mussolini's far-from-creditable imperial adventure.

However, so long as no one mentioned the war, the shift in period served the play well enough. At the opening of the play, townspeople were wandering about. Children played morra (an Italian version of scissors-cut-paper), and two elderly men (one Antonio, the other Verges) sat on the bench in front of the villa. A table downstage at the right indicated a cafe, and large marionettes hanging over the back of one of the chairs gave a hint of the Sicilian puppetry that the masked ball later took up. Borachio (John Killoran) slouched on, self-consciously aggressive in a leather jacket worn over an undershirt. When the dispatch rider arrived with news from the front, Harriet Walter, in trousers that brought Katharine Hepburn to mind, mounted his motorbike and started it. The freedom she claimed and the general alarm it caused were firmly indicated in this action. The other women wore simple cotton dresses in floral prints. Beatrice insisted on being different. When Don Pedro (Clive Wood) and his party arrived, for the most part nattily uniformed, Benedick—another tolerated and admired eccentric—soon relaxed into an amiable, comfortable slouch. His principal item of luggage was a carpetbag, from which he produced a bottle of spirits. (This was a private supply of alcohol, carefully returned to the bag after he had drawn on it.) Don Pedro was nervously enthusiastic, well turned-out, and slightly camp. Benedick had a few days' growth of beard, and there was no spring in his step. He and Beatrice eyed each other across the stage before she initiated their first exchange of wit. When he turned his back on her as a way of having the last word, she seemed genuinely hurt. The dialogue between Benedick and Claudio (John Hopkins) had an edge, as though the seasoned campaigner felt himself challenged by the younger man's callow enthusiasm.

There was a palpable psychotic element in Don John's villainy: tortured by the prospect of Claudio's happiness, he curled up in a fetal position centerstage and was brought out of his anguish by the prospect of a plot. In the masquerade the men wore costumes and masks that suggested the stock figure of the soldier-hero in Sicilian puppetry. Benedick's mask and crested helmet were more outrageous than the rest, but the credibility of the “serious” mistaking by Claudio was maintained. The gulling scene began with a new variation on the business with the boy whom he sends for a book, who this time not only reappeared at an inopportune moment but insisted on a tip. Le Provost's delivery of Benedick's soliloquies was consistent with his performance throughout, being conversational and candid rather than self-conscious and showy. Beatrice (who appeared at the top of the steps with a dinner gong to summon him to dinner) delivered her verse soliloquy at the end of the scene with similar gravitas and simplicity, but this was in contrast to the farcical actions that accompanied her eavesdropping on Hero (Kirsten Parker) and Ursula (Noma Dumezweni): first she ran lapwing-like close to the ground, then she took up a position behind the shrubbery, finally moving down to the right, where Hero and Ursula, armed with a stirrup-pump and water bucket, soaked her under the pretext of watering the honeysuckle. Dripping, Beatrice stood centerstage for her soliloquy.

Margaret (Sarah Ball) was treated with some subtlety and without any attempt to iron out the contradictions in the role. The second part of the performance began with Claudio downstage, covertly observing two silhouetted figures making vigorous love. On the morning of the wedding, while Beatrice was desperately trying to treat her cold by inhaling the fumes from a steaming basin, Margaret dominated the scene. Her body language throughout had suggested a less restrained sexuality than that of the other women: earlier she had sat with her legs apart, smoking. Now, wearing only a slinky silk slip, she taunted Beatrice's reticence. It was credible that she should have relished what she thought a harmless but piquant adventure in borrowing Hero's dress for an amorous encounter, and during the church scene, she left hurriedly and in evident distress at the news of Hero's death. Despite this, her demeanor with Benedick in a later scene did not suggest a very profound remorse.

Doran staged the unhappiest scenes of the play forcefully but without melodrama. Leonato's grief in the church was quietly effective. He sat apart from the central group and did no violence to Hero. After the friar's insistence on Hero's innocence and his proposal of a strategy to prove it, Benedick exited with the others. He then came back in search of his cap and found Beatrice in tears. He restrained her lovingly as she writhed in anger at the thought of Claudio's betrayal of Hero, and his response to “Kill Claudio” was one of involuntary astonishment that turned quickly into resolution. Benedick's challenge to Claudio came as the unpleasant aftermath to the confrontation between Leonato (Gary Waldhorn), Antonio (Trevor Martin), and the two younger men. Don Pedro's strained attempt to ease the tension with a joke, which petered out embarrassingly, was of a piece with his nervously forced good humor throughout the play and prepared the ground for his exclusion from the general mood of rejoicing at the end.

The personable and engaging Claudio was sincerely contrite when he heard the news of Hero's death and seemed disturbed in the scene at her tomb. All the same, he still had some way to go in the acquisition of tact. In the final scene he insisted, “I'd hold my mind [to marry Hero] were she an Ethiope,” as he carelessly handed his gloves to Ursula—who happened to be black. He did realize immediately that he had put his foot in it, with a “take” that did something to acknowledge his blunder. The high spirits of the ending were qualified by the behavior of Don Pedro: Don John was marched onstage under escort (Conrade seemed to have changed sides), and after the confrontation, Don Pedro, having acquired a bottle, walked up the stairs and disappeared into the house. Margaret, in an irrepressible return to her independence, danced with Conrade and Borachio, giving them both the glad eye but jilting the drunkard in favor of the turncoat. All the characters except Don Pedro participated in the final dance.