★★★★★
It turns out that what Shakespeare’s tale of sparring lovers has been waiting for all these centuries was a relocation to revolutionary Mexico. Who knew? The director Matthew Dunster, that’s who. Yet since Dunster’s last good wheeze was his much-derided adaptation of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities that has just opened at Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre in London, you might have feared another modish mishmash.
Not a bit of it. This is the most joyous Shakespeare show I’ve seen here for years. Sure, it takes a little while for cast and audience alike to get to grips with the rules of engagement in war-weary 1910 Monterrey (as opposed to 16th-century Messina). Men and women wear stilts and clutch wire-framed horse heads to suggest they are riding. Anna Fleischle’s set is dominated by giant train carriages upstage, which host a three-man mariachi band on the roof and will come to offer doors and compartments galore, from which Beatrice and Benedick will eavesdrop in farcical fashion.
There are bandoliers around the men’s dirty necks, the women are in gloriously colourful dresses, but Dunster also scuffs up the sexual roles by turning the villainous Don John from a bastard brother to an unfairly overlooked sister. It pretty much all clicks. And turning Dogberry (Ewan Wardrop) from a malapropism-spouting constable to an American film-maker speaking badly in a foreign tongue leads to some nifty knockabout and a chance to show the dim Claudio (a slightly stilted Marcello Cruz) visual evidence of how wrong he was to shame Hero (an excellent Anya Chalotra) at the altar.
Dunster and his composer, James Maloney, went on a recce to Mexico before rehearsals. If that sounds like a bit of a beano, the results more than justify it. Mixing Mexican strumathons with Pink Floydian hums and a touching rendition of PJ Harvey’s The Desperate Kingdom of Love — hey, maybe it was playing on the inflight radio — lends an alternately sultry and melancholy spirit to love games both silly and deadly serious.
None of the adroit liberty-taking would add up to much without adorable performances from our leads, though. This thirtysomething pair are quick, sarcastic, vulnerable, a knockout. Beatriz Romilly oozes dubiousness as Beatrice, the woman who “speaks in knives” but is itching for someone to match her wits. As our hangdog, often hilarious Benedick, Matthew Needham has that rare ability to make his verse feel like real thinking out loud, while he handles the physical gags as nimbly as he masters his later slide into maturity.
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The excellent ensemble succeed, as well as I’ve ever seen it done, in showing us the pleasures and pitfalls of believing in what other people say about you. The result is a laugh-out-loud comedy that puts a tear in the eye and a tap in the toes. Is it Needham who looks not entirely at home amid all that carefully choreographed exuberance at the end, or is it Benedick? Works either way. A glorious way to spend a summer evening.
Box office: 020 7401 9919, to October 15