| Why make a new film of Much Ado About Nothing? In this century,Shakespeare s play has been produced as a feature film on fouroccasions. The first wa~" ~m American silent version in 1926; an EastGerman version was made in 1963, and two Russian films appeared in1956 and "1973. There have also been television versions, often ofnotable stage productions like Franco Zeffirelii s in 1967 and JosephPapp s in 1973. But why no modern cinema version? Certainly the movie world s financers have always evinced suspicionabout the commercial possibilities of Shakespeare on film. Yet popular plays like Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet have not only worked spectacularlyin film versions by Zeffirelli and Sir Laurence Olivier but have provedcommercial enough to be repeated on film many times. There are sixtymovie versions of Hamlet. It seems odd that Much Ado About Nothing has not fallen into thiscategory. Since Shakespeare wrote the play, in the mid to latter part of1598, it has been an enduring success. The 1600 edition tells us that bythen it had been sundrie times publikely acted. The play was certainly acrowd pleaser and puller. The poet Leonard Digges observed, Let but Beatrice And Benediek be seen, to, in a trice The cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full. The role of Dogberry was an enormous success for the first greatclown of Shakespeare s company, Will Kempe. Down the centuries since,the leading roles have attracted many notable actors: David Garrick,Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and, in our own time, John Gielgud, PeggyAshcroft, and Maggie Smith. But does this play rest too completely onthe kind of merry war twixt Signior Benedick and her [Beatrice] ? Andcan the expression of this conflict, in puns, courtly wit, verbal conceits,translate into the medium of film ? Can its identity-defining wordplay bedramatic in a screenplay? Well, yes, I believe it can, but more than that, I believe a film of MuchAdo allows us to see in unique focus the breadth of a play that goesmuch further than the celebration of one gloriously witty couple. Beatriceand Benedick are, after all, the subplot. The challenge for a new film of Much Ado is not to resist Beatrice andBenedick s dominance but, through the choices made by the camera, tobring to vivid life all the other characters. To take on the play as a wholeand realize fully-fleshed lives, for characters like the Friar, the Watch,and Leonato s househgld in a realistic background and an evocativelandscape. Against this detail the Beatrice and Benedick sequences donot sit merely as star turns. Perhaps most importantly, there is room in amovie to give a different kind of space to the Claudio/Hero plot. My first thoughts about a film version occurred in 1988. At that time Ihad not yet directed my first feature film (Shakespeare s Henry V), but Ifound that often after seeing a play, filmic images suggested by the playwould haunt me. The movie would start to run in my imagination. All the |
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