Much Ado About Nothing
At the moment I’m not sure what I think of this. Make no mistake I am not one of those annoying purists who can’t stand any adoption that does not involve Elizabethan costume in fact my favorite version of Julius Ceasar remains a 1989 Trinity Repertory Company production directed by Oskar Eustis that did the whole thing as a metaphor for the Kennedy assassination in 60s dress (you can not know true horror until you’ve seen Mark Antony’s speech televised). So any imaginable angle on a Shakespeare play is okay by me even if it fails terribly.
So I have no problem with Much Ado About Nothing in modern dress involving what appears to be Hollywood yuppies. At the moment what stands out to me is the blatant use of the American dialect. Again I shouldn’t have a problem with this after all the Elizabethan English is a lot closer to American English than it is to British English. But the thing in most American productions, even when they are not affecting a British accent they speak the dialogue so formally you forget that they are not. What I’m seeing in this trailer has them speaking it so naturally that it almost sounds like a foreign language. Which should be fascinating.
Maybe my uncertainty is because Joss Whedon is the last person I would imagine attached to a project like this. Hopefully I’m being unfair. I’ll be looking forward to see what I think of it.
