MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING

MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING (Directed by and starring Kenneth Brannagh, with Richard Briers, Michael Keaton, Robert Sean Leonard, Keanu Reeves, Emma Thompson and Denzel Washington)

THE BRITISH film industry hardly deserves the name these days, a cottage industry selling snobbery to Americans. Having just about run out of E.M. Forster novels, it was a safe bet someone would drag Shakespeare out of the culture cupboard. Kenneth Brannagh, self-appointed heir to Sir Laurence Olivier (lacking only the looks, the charisma, the subtlety and the title) launched his unlikely cinematic career with the bard's Henry V, a title which no doubt confused much of middle America, who had not seen Henry, Henry I, Henry II, Henry III or Henry IV. Still, they gave it some Oscars, since everybody knows what a classic is and you don't get much more classic than old Bill.

Henry V was a brave, or perhaps foolhardy attempt to reclaim a classic text from beneath the nose of Olivier, who had directed an acclaimed cinematic version in 1944. It replaced the wartime patriotism with a more contemporary ambivalence to violence and heroics but, despite the slo-mo and gore it was clear Brannagh had not yet found his cinematic feet. In the wake of the laughable Dead Again and the not laughable enough Peter's Friends, our Ken has returned to the land of the lithp, although this time he has chosen a light rather than deeply dramatic text that proves more suitable to his fine thespian but limited directorial talents.

Much Ado About Nothing starts with a flurry of action: a host of Hollywood actors riding over the horizon like The Magnificent Seven and a flash of bawdy nudity as the excited women prepare for their arrival. But it soon settles down to a straightforward, if boisterous, reading of the play, forsaking cinematic flourishes for faithful adherence to the text. Not that Brannagh doesn't try, he employs long tracking shots, double exposures and a riot of choreographed colour but he is clearly no master of the cinematic vocabulary. Much Ado has none of the visual drama of Olivier's Shakespeare, Polanski's Macbeth or any of Welles' low budget but visionary stabs at the bard. Nor does he attempt the reinvention or reinterpretation that the likes of Greenaway or even Kurosawa have applied to Shakespeare's work in order to drag it from stage to screen.

Brannagh's bard is faithful and sincere. But as Shakespeare himself wrote (in Hamlet) 'the play's the thing'. Much Ado About Nothing is almost a prototype bedroom farce, revolving around mistaken identity, double entendre and unlikely character conjunctions. But overflowing with stunning language and dragging along an undercurrent of Shakespeare's darker side, it is a text with substantial things to say about the fickle nature of love. Brannagh's strengths are in the acting department, both in his own delightful playing of the cynical but soon smitten Benedick (conducting another onscreen romance with Mrs Brannagh, Emma Thompson) and in his inspired casting.

The American actors were doubtless recruited as much for their box office appeal as their thespian credentials, yet are superbly employed for their onscreen passion, with Denzel Washington relaxed yet regal as Don Pedro, Robert Sean Leonard filled with adolescent flushes of passion and rage as the impetuous Claudio and Keanu Reeves' one-note performance as a glowering villain somehow investing Don John with vivid appeal. British Shakespearean regulars such as Richard Briers and Brian Blessed fill the more re-active roles, playing wittily off the American's drive. Only Michael Keaton seems out of place as the Clownish Dogsberry, reinterpreted as a kind of Beatlejuice with a stage Irish accent.

The end result is an enjoyable, if far from vital, interpretation, in the school of Zefferelli's, rather than Olivier's Hamlet. It is a middle brow Shakespeare for middle America, impossible to dismiss but providing little to make much ado about.