Word: gille
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...directional debut with the American Shakespeare Festival, Peter Gill has come up with a winner. His Much Ado About Nothing is quite something--both for the ear and the eye. Bernard Shaw referred to the work as "Much Adoodle-do" and branded it "a shocking bad play." That's going too far. But it is a minor work. Its borrowed main plot is preposterous and flawed; and Shakespeare was pretty careless now and then (twice he even calls for Leonato's wife Innogen to come on stage, though she neither speaks nor is ever spoken to or about...
...experience of writing the inferior Love's Labour's Lost before he could produce this middling play, he had to write Much Ado and the similarly middling As You Like It before he was able to follow them up with the miraculous gem he called Twelfth Night. Still, Gill and his charges had me believing for a stretch of two-and-a-half hours that Much Ado is really a good play--and that is no mean achievement...
...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...
...evil Don John, who is the cause of all the trouble, Michael McGuire is aptly sourfaced. At the play's end, when John is reported to have been captured in flight and brought back, Benedick says, "Think not on him till tomorrow." But director Gill brings John on stage at once to participate merrily in the concluding festive dance. This is a glaring mistake; John is not to be so readily forgiven, nor exempted from the "brave punishments" Benedick promises to devise...
...Miss Gill said that she wanted SFAC to encourage the Faculty "to adopt a motion whereby implementation of the Wilson Report would be put in the hands of the Board of Overseers" instead of the Corporation. She also wanted SFAC's help in getting an invitation to address the Faculty...