MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING by William Shakespeare

“I do spy some marks of love in her.”

Performance

This short performance is a joyful bubbling brook of a rom-com with a warning sign that malice, power games and social critique lurk beneath the surface. Is love a virus or a cure? In a world

of deceptions and masks, the lines between romance, violence, desire, and revenge blur. Do we celebrate existing notions of love or deconstruct them and strike courtship down? Can we do both? What is the role of leaders and their relationship to compassion, equality, and justice? Are they the source of our ‘bum jokes’ or elected to maintain the status quo?

Workshop

Where the performance blends light and dark interpretations, our workshop investigates how the text supports more extreme readings. One could see Don John as a comic evil villain or a painful portrait of a man disenfranchised by his birth. Could Hero and Claudio be pure and innocent lovers or representations of the transactional transfer of possessions and influence? And are Beatrice and Benedick profound portraits of the emotional journey of love or courtiers jousting in a world too prudish to talk openly of sex.