[written for The Public Reviews] There are numerous modern versions of Shakespeare in film and theatre which attempt to bring the plays to a younger audience; often they simplify the plot so it becomes unrecognisable and the poetry of the plays is almost always sacrificed. This hip-hop version of Much Ado About Nothing could easily have been an empty gimmick and I was bracing myself for an uncomfortable hour of dumbed-down theatre. Luckily Funk It Up is fresh and clever; it preserves the main elements of Shakespeare’s plot but it also translates the rich humour and electric wit that characterises the language of the original play. The achingly cool GQ & JQ bring Much Ado bang up to date in a production which matches the ethos of the Theatre Royal Stratford East: to draw inspiration from the community which the theatre serves and then reflect that in the plays it stages.
Much Ado is centred in the feisty Beatrice and her nemesis, Benedick, who indulge in constant sparring and verbal jousting, cleverly transmuted into a rap battle. Here verbal prowess and the ability to speak wittily are respected and shown to be a positive part of today’s youth generation. This tendency to praise hip-hop culture is leavened by gratuitous but hilarious sexual explicitness (Benedick is a ‘cunning-linguist’ who just dodges the expected rhyme, ‘a genius, with a really big…vocabulary’) and, more jarringly, an uncomfortable recourse to emphasising the desire for women to know when to be quiet and a strong, almost violent, reaction to alleged female indiscretion. Hero is vilified and publicly humiliated by Claudio when he believes her to have slept with another man, in this version, just as much as in the original Shakespeare. It is a powerful message, hidden within an overtly funny production, that attitudes to women troublingly still resemble those of 500 years ago.
What made this production really enjoyable for someone who knows Shakespeare well is that, by using the vehicle of rap, it preserved the verbal alacrity of the original and also was very self-aware when making jokes about the conventions of Shakespearian drama. The excellent GQ, playing Leonato, has to stifle a laugh as he firstly shows incomprehension at how Claudio can be both himself and the judge then secondly has to admit to the audience that he is also the Governor of Messina so, in that capacity, he can marry the happy couple and bring the play to a happy end. All of the cast were skilled rappers with great comic timing and engaging physical presence on stage. The only character with a slight weakness, although played admirably by Jillian Burfete, was Hero who was conceived of as gratingly fey and had possibly the worst line of the play: ‘I’m Hero, the heroin, not the drug but the main character of this play I’m in’. Erick Ratcliff was strong as Beatrice with an accomplished delivery which had the audience gasping at her verbal acrobatics.
The most impressive thing about the production was that it attracted an audience which was predominantly young and from a mixed background and ethnicity, so unlike the theatre audiences I have observed in the West End which are predominantly middle class, middle-aged and white. Although by no means for children, I can certainly see the appeal to a younger theatre-goer and to anyone who enjoys intelligent comedy. Ultimately Shakespeare was a fan of words, wit and sex and Funk It Up About Nothin’ has all of these things in riotous abundance.
Runs until 7th May
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