Word: benedick
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...both the play and this production is balance. Much Ado, like the other plays in Shakespeare's Renaissance style (as opposed to his Mannerist and Baroque styles), exhibited a good deal of symmetry. The central tragicomic Claudio-Hero plot is balanced by the high comedy of Beatrice and Benedick and the low comedy of Dogberry and Verges. The evil bastard Don John is a foil to his genial legitimate brother Don Pedro; and these young brothers contrast with the older-generation brothers Antonio and Leonato. Don John's two male attendants (Borachio and Conrade) balance. Hero's female ones (Margaret...
...text. An objective inspection of the script indicates that he seems not to have had his heart in the Claudio-Hero plot he borrowed from elsewhere. His chief achievement in the play are precisely those things he had to invent himself: the witty verbal skirmishing between Beatrice and Benedick, and the portrait of bureaucratic officialdom represented by the malapropistic Dogberry and his sorry crew. (Shaw is about the only person who has denied the wit of the high comedy, perhaps because Beatrice and Benedick so closely resemble some of the most famous characters in Shaw's own plays...
Beatrice and Benedick, then, are far and away the most engrossing personages in the play. And even in productions in which the serious plot is tedious, it is essential that the man and woman who play this sharp-tongued pair be evenly matched--otherwise the result is fatally unbalanced...
...Festival has offered Much Ado twice before. In 1957 Alfred Drake was the most brilliant Benedick I've ever seen (perhaps partly because Drake is also a singer); but Katharine Hepburn was just no match for him. Then Philip Bosco was a magnificently vibrant Benedick in 1964, but Jacqueline Brookes couldn't come close...
Director Gill has done more, however, than provide two balanced leads shining against a dull background. His surprising accomplishment has been to elicit a new kind of balance: somehow he has managed to pull the rest of his cast up to the level of his Beatrice and Benedick, almost to a man. Although the text rises and sags, all the component groups of characters come across on a rather evenly balanced level; it is this that makes the play seem better than it really is. This Much Ado is a real company show. Just about everyone speaks cleanly, crisply, intelligibly...