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Much Ado: Comments on a Play I'll Probably Never See
To be honest, as soon as I heard that the Tennant/Tate Much Ado had been shifted to the 1980s, I felt a lot better about the fact that I'll probably never get to see it.
It's not the performances - I'm sure they're brillaint. (He is, after all, a trained Shakespearean actor, she is a comedic actor, they have good chemistry.)
It's not the time shift per se - I've seen amazing productions that have been shifted to a variety of times. The Folger did one set WWI that was just brilliant; Benedict was an American volunteer in the nascent British air force and his hinted previous abandonment of Beatrice was because he'd gone home to America at one point. Fantastic production.
However, past about 1950, timeshifting this particular play just falls all to hell. Massive, integral parts of the plot deal with the concept of Hero's status as an untouched virgin, from the aborted wedding scene through the important and heartwrenching moment when Benedict has to choose between Beatrice ("Kill Claudio!") and his soldier brethren... and he choses her. (I know there are Benedict/Beatrice only versions of the play out there, and how the heck they deal with this moment I can't even imagine. Even the plot against the prince ties back to Hero-as-virgin.)
But once you go past the '50s, the idea of a woman's honor being tied entirely to her virginity in a Western setting is dead and gone, stabbed by the 60s of free love, trampled by the 70s of rising feminism, and kicked entirely into its grave by the 80s when it's simply no longer any kind of a deal, much less a big one, that a woman has taken control of her sexuality.
I don't know if I could be made to laugh hard enough to get over that inherent cognitive dissonance.
It's not the performances - I'm sure they're brillaint. (He is, after all, a trained Shakespearean actor, she is a comedic actor, they have good chemistry.)
It's not the time shift per se - I've seen amazing productions that have been shifted to a variety of times. The Folger did one set WWI that was just brilliant; Benedict was an American volunteer in the nascent British air force and his hinted previous abandonment of Beatrice was because he'd gone home to America at one point. Fantastic production.
However, past about 1950, timeshifting this particular play just falls all to hell. Massive, integral parts of the plot deal with the concept of Hero's status as an untouched virgin, from the aborted wedding scene through the important and heartwrenching moment when Benedict has to choose between Beatrice ("Kill Claudio!") and his soldier brethren... and he choses her. (I know there are Benedict/Beatrice only versions of the play out there, and how the heck they deal with this moment I can't even imagine. Even the plot against the prince ties back to Hero-as-virgin.)
But once you go past the '50s, the idea of a woman's honor being tied entirely to her virginity in a Western setting is dead and gone, stabbed by the 60s of free love, trampled by the 70s of rising feminism, and kicked entirely into its grave by the 80s when it's simply no longer any kind of a deal, much less a big one, that a woman has taken control of her sexuality.
I don't know if I could be made to laugh hard enough to get over that inherent cognitive dissonance.
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