Playing Shakespeare

Cutting the play

Much Ado About Nothing usually runs for about three hours. The Globe Theatre is open to the elements and because our production is being performed in March, it may well be very cold. Three hours is a long time for an audience to stand in the cold.

In my cut I wanted it to get straight to the core of the story. When editing the text, my starting point was not looking at what could be cut, but rather what was essential to keep in. I identified moments that didn't drive the story forward and cut jokes and phrases that a modern audience might find obscure or difficult to understand.

There are ten actors in this production, so as well as some people doubling roles, I have combined the characters of Borachio and Conrade and also Margaret and Ursula. Some characters, such as Antonio have been cut completely and I have given some of his lines to Leonato.

As the members of the audience will primarily be young people who are studying the play for exams, I have had to edit the set scenes for national assessment at KS3 very carefully. However, it is not possible to present these scenes in full without creating an imbalance in the pace and rhythm of the whole production.

Act 5, Scene 4

In our production, this scene begins with Hero reading aloud the epitaph that Claudio has left on her monument in Act 5, Scene 3. Shakespeare has not assigned many lines to the character of Hero, and we felt that it is important for the audience to see her response and feelings at this moment in the play.

As Antonio is not in our production, his important lines in this scene have been given to Leonato. There will only be three masked ladies, rather than four, entering the space as Margaret and Ursula have been condensed into one character.

Apart from cutting lines which slow down the action, we have also omitted the later half of line 39 where Claudio says "I'll hold my mind, were she an Ethiope". We are cutting this racial slur because we feel that it is not appropriate for a modern audience. On a practical level, the actress playing Hero in our production is black, and so this line would simply not make sense.

Some of the references to horns and cuckolds can be confusing, but it is important that the audience get a sense of the meaning and to witness the fact that Don Pedro and Claudio are still choosing to tease Benedick at this point in the play. So, even though they don't necessarily help to move the action forward, we have kept the lines.

One other significant decision has to be made when it comes to line 97. In some editions of the play Leonato rather than Benedick says "Peace! I will stop your mouth". In rehearsals last year we tried it out both ways and decided that it worked better - and was funnier - when Leonato said it. He literally knocked Beatrice and Benedick's heads together, forcing them to stop talking and to kiss. As a different actor is playing Leonato this year, we are yet to decide which character will say this line and will try both ways again in rehearsal.