Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare's Globe Theatre)

High Times in the London Rain
"Much Ado About Nothing" works because of the attractive, vibrant, intelligent lovers at its center. Benedick and Beatrice are wickedly funny (and vain about it), self-involved yet deeply generous, and each is fascinated by (if intensely ambivalent about) the other. They engage in relentless verbal fencing--sometimes innocuous, sometimes wounding--and when they are "tricked" into falling in love, the audience sees that they are the last to learn what everyone else has long known.

Productions of "Much Ado" stand or fall on the performances of these two, and the Globe Theatre was immensely fortunate to have Eve Best and Charles Edwards to bring them to life. Edwards plays a Benedick struggling out of a prolonged adolescence into the commitments of adulthood, swinging between confident bluster and lost, boyish perplexity, while Best plays Beatrice as surprisingly rough-hewn, combative, and wounded. But with all her aggressiveness, she is also very, very funny, as is Edwards...

Wonderful Production
I saw this production live in London (stood in the rain) and I saw it in the states when it was played at a local cinema. Eve Best and Charles Edwards are perfect as Beatrice and Benedict. Phil Cumbus is brilliant as Claudio and Paul Hunter is hilarious as the bumbling Dogberry. If you are a fan of Shakespeare and his comedies, this is well worth the purchase.

Terrific live performance, well captured on film. And rain!!!
I have seen three different Shakespeare plays at the Globe theater in London, and they have all been a fantastic experience. Two of them (Othello (Shakespeare's Globe Theatre Production) and Henry VIII: Shakespeare's Globe Theatre) have been released as dvd's But, I haven't watched them yet. This is the first dvd from the Globe that I have watched- and loved it.

The reconstructed Globe theater is essentially an exact reproduction of a theatre (almost on this exact spot) where many of Shakespeare's plays were actually performed. It is open air, quite "natural", with seats and standing room (groundlings) just as in 1600. In fact, to me, with only a slight exaggeration, it is very much like being back 400 years and watching one of his plays. Certainly the productions are meant to be reasonably authentic to those times. And what...

Click to Editorial Reviews