My friend and I saw the new production of William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado about Nothing” at the Duke Theater yesterday evening. Very nice production — you could tell that everyone in the cast was having loads of fun with the many puns, double entendres and plot reversals, which is the way it should be with this wonderful play.
One thing that made me very happy was the presence of lots of young people. It seemed that nearly half of the audience were in their twenties, and one entire section was filled with teenage girls, who laughed with delight at every clever joke and plot twist.
Shakespeare can be an odd mix of the perfectly modern and the nearly incomprehensible. His characters may say things that sound eerily up-to-date one moment, and then the very next moment use some turn of phrase that has been out of fashion for four centuries.
Without studying the play beforehand, these incomprehensible moments can feel a bit like hearing a joke in an unknown foreign language. An audience needs to be willing to go with things, to let such passages flow over them gracefully as they give in to the enthusiasm of the cast.
There was something absolutely thrilling about seeing a delighted audience of young people do exactly that, and about knowing that Shakespeare is always going to relevant.