Much Ado About Nothing Review

Much Ado About Nothing was a clever and well thought out performance. I enjoyed the different characters, the subtle humor and the plot. I thought the actors and the director did a very good job.

 I was surprised that the play was not set way back to medieval times, but instead right after World War I. I always thought that a Shakespeare play had to be set way in the past or in present time (modern). But somehow, it made the performance easier to watch, because the time period was not completely alien to me, and it was more realistic. The clothing was not made out of silks, and the characters did not put on dramatic accents to try and make the show better.

I have seen five Shakespeare plays, not including Much Ado About Nothing: an adapted version of Macbeth only a year ago named The Throne of Blood; Romeo and Juliet; Twelfth Night; Cymbeline; and The Taming of the Shrew. I compared all of the shows and noticed that they had at least one thing in common: The way the actors/characters said their lines was not realistic. Instead of trying to speak normally, like they would with non-Shakespeare language, they yelled all of their words and paused for effect after every sentence. This made the plays interesting, but I couldn’t really connect to the characters or what they were saying. The reason I mentioned this is because in Much Ado About Nothing, I understood and connected to the situations because the actors delivered their lines realistically.

            My favorite character was Dogberry (a constable), because even though he wasn’t one of the main characters, he had stage presence and was a natural comedian. He had great comedic delivery, and made me laugh really hard. It is very important that the actor becomes their character, or else the audience will be taken out of the world of the play. The actor that played Dogberry became his character.

            Much Ado About Nothing was very fun to watch, and maybe one of the first Shakespeare plays that I really understood. The actors did a great job of becoming their characters, and the performance really makes me want to get more interested in the world of Shakespeare. The experience was thrilling.