Time Out
by Dominic Cavendish, 10 June 1998

Cheek by Jowl's farewell production touches down after an international tour that has had foreign critics swooning with admiration. You can see why. This Much Ado displays many of the qualities that have made the company's co founders, director Declan Donnellan and designer Nick Ormerod, so revered over the past 17 years. The staging is lucid and fluid , with every member of the ensemble gainfully employed in the task of telling the sex war comedy in a manner that is choreographed without being showy, as tightly bound as a corset and yet still pulsating with life.

There is no set to speak of, just an array of cream-coloured banners descending from on high and on to which leafy coloured light is projected. The sense of place, turn of the century England, is conveyed mainly through the characters. The soldiers, with their pristine bottle green uniforms, waxed short back and sides and daft moustaches look like out-sized escapees from a Victorian children's nursery. Their behaviour, however, is more redolent of boarding school types at a garden party: braying, sniggering and point-scoring, they freeze in group portraits of the absurd, latently homosexual horseplay. The women, in nondescript white skirts and blouses, share the same clipped enunciation, but they're from a different planet as far as the men are concerned. When Bohdan Poraj's clueless Claudio is given Hero's hand in marriage, he rushes not into her arms but into those of Don Pedro (Stephen Mangan) the friend who wooed her on his behalf.

The point is sufficiently well made that this is a gender-polarised world which Benedick, our sworn bachelor hero, and Beatrice, the sworn spinster with whom he spars, are wise to break from. We watch in delight as Matthew Macfadyen's superb Benedick and Saskia Reeves' schoolmarmish Beatrice are tricked into love via hilarious eavesdropping scenes and arrive at weepy eyed affection. As if we didn't know how it would end, Cheek by Jowl are bowing out on a high.