PERFORMANCE & COMEDY

Arnos Vale Cemetery, Bristol (to Sat 15 Oct)

THEATRE A cemetery may seem a pretty odd choice for a performance of a comedy – and indeed it is. Roughhouse Theatre's stripped-down, modern dress production of Shakespeare’s play begins outdoors in the gothic setting of Arnos Vale graveyard, and ends indoors in the Anglican chapel there. There’s no mention of a cemetery or a church in the play; and fighting dim lighting outdoors and echoing acoustic indoors seems at first glance an unnecessary challenge for an audience. But making your way gradually through the tombs towards the chapel while the action goes on around you is a stimulating way to start. And sending Valentine off to Milan in a motorcar is a nice touch.

Not one of the Bard’s greatest masterpieces, this, with the standard Elizabethan requirements: tangled love interest, woman disguised as a man, plenty of wildly overdone and usually filthy punning, and everyone forgiven and getting married to each other at the end. Inevitably, with no fancy costumes, lighting or sets to distract, attention focuses here solely on the skill of the performers. And a sparky lot they were; there was the comic delight of Robert Harper’s no-nonsense North Country Launce, accompanied by the disembodied barking of his dog Crab; Feargus Woods-Dunlop’s Valentine, alternately ludicrously lovestruck over Julia, and later steely in his wrath at the perfidious Proteus; the ditzy but determined Julia herself, played with enormous energy by Grace Bendle; and Moira Hunt as a particularly feisty Lucetta, to name but four.

All told, undoubtedly the best performance of a Shakespeare comedy Venue's ever seen in a cemetery. What next, we wonder. 'Merry Wives of Windsor' in an abattoir? (John Christopher Wood)

Copyright John Christopher Wood 2011