It's Benedick and Beatrice we give a toss about and Tate, with her TV moue firmly in place, gibes, swaggers and torments her way through the first half, a Beatrice entirely without charm, using her wit as a mallet.
She does have real stage presence: physically large and imposing, unlike all the neat and nifty Beatrices we've seen teasing poor Benedick. The trouble is, she doesn't appear to be remotely in love with him at any level, and the shift to tenderness never convinces. The Wham! generation of pleasure-seekers also creates some oddities. If Beatrice is so upset at the treatment of her wronged kinswoman Hero, why is she lying on a sun-lounger in a maxi-dress when everyone else is in mourning? Silly distractions, these, but the inevitable result of over-egging an already rich pudding.
Tennant is the more rounded Shakespearean actor, with dark eyes darting anxiously around in grief and sheer bewilderment. He excels in the scene where he is gulled into thinking Beatrice loves him, which is played here as broad farce. When Beatrice falls for the same trick, she ends up swaying from a decorator's hoist. These are farcical intrusions somewhere between Goldoni and Charley's Aunt. A lot of the Wyndham's Shakespeare audiences are there for the first time, new groundlings lured by the telly names — and nothing wrong with that. It's uplifting to see a crowd on their feet hollering acclaim at the cast after a first encounter with Shakespeare, but the production isn't as big as its big names.
Back at the National, Andrew Upton has been doing up Chekhov, with his own reimagining of an aristocratic world in which characters say "frigging" and "bollocks" round the samovar. Yes, well. Upton's White Guard reflected his talent for bringing Russian classics to modern audiences with pace and revolutionary liberties with the text. That's harder to pull off with The Cherry Orchard, an unusually uneventful Chekhov play which relies on a sense of mood and loss for its emotional power. The result feels a bit forced and hectic, though rescued by Zoe Wanamaker's grande dame performance of imperious whimsy, oblivious to the dangers encroaching on her ancestral home. Bunny Christie's set, opening up from the tumbledown house to reveal the Russian wilderness beyond, is gorgeously dreamy and Conleth Hill's clumsy, wily Lopakhin steals the show. But when we have a pre-revolutionary character alluding to the Sixties pop lyric "Oh Lord! Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood", we have wandered too far from the tone and purpose of a great play for it to be credible.
One day, I predict, some happening director is going to give audiences a surprising hit. They will take a classic drama, use the original text with everyone in period dress, but it will still touch us. You never know.
