The Guardian
February 22, 2003
By Michael Billington

Trevor Nunn ends his six-year tenure of the National with Shakespeare's first comic masterpiece. But, while his production has occasional felicities and uses many of the cast of Anything Goes, it lacks that show's airborne lightness and smothers an already dense text in too much novelistic detail.

For a start Nunn has needlessly restructured Shakespeare's play. The evening begins with gunfire, explosions and a uniformed Berowne caught up in a fierce first world war battle. He then proceeds to dream of the Edwardian amorous skirmishings and broken vows of academic seclusion he has left behind.

The point of all this becomes clear at the climax when we realise Berowne has taken Rosaline's injunction to "visit the speechless sick" into the fields of Flanders. But the framing-device is gratuitous and even preempts one of the most magical moments in all Shakespeare: the entrance of Marcade, the messenger of death, into the final revels.

It is symptomatic, however, of a production over-stuffed with detail. John Gunter's setting is a seductive grass-covered forest glade, but this is the cue for an endlessly busy rustic soundtrack in which cuckoos sing, ravens croak and flies buzz. But the fussiness continues all through with much textual transposition and even the beautifully simple climactic song of the owl and the cuckoo being turned into a production number.

When Nunn actually trusts Shakespeare's play the production is very good. The initial vow of academic hibernation is well done with Simon Day's bossy king of Navarre swathing his followers in academic robes; and the oath's eventual dissolution, under the pressure of love, is as hilarious as ever with Joseph Fiennes' aristocratic Berowne turning an apology for broken faith into a rousing call to amorous action.

Nunn also creates a sense of bustling community. Martin Marquez makes Don Adriano a genuinely dignified Spanish nobleman who simply has an unfortunate talent for mangling language so that he talks of the king dallying with his "excrement". Robin Soans turns the pedantic schoolmaster, Holofernes, into a self-infatuated Latinate fusspot basking in the admiration of Paul Grunert's cleric. And, although I have seen the visiting French party more strongly characterised, Olivia William's Princess has a grumpy sadness and Philip Voss makes Boyet a wonderfully dandified lovemonger.

There is much to enjoy. But what the production cries out for is severe editing so that the verbal fencing is swifter and sharper.