We booked our tickets the day after we saw David Tennant and Katherine Tate announcing their production of Much Ado About Nothing on TV, but could only manage to book tickets for a Friday: the journey to London was difficult and very long, but it was worth it for the play.
Josie Rourke had set the action in Gibraltar in the 1980s, which allowed for some brillaint pastiches of typical music for the period. The set itself was a circle surrounded by louvred doors and windows and with large pillars set across the circle. This allowed the productionto keep up a fast pace and - more importantly - allowed the stage to revolve during ceertain scenes so that the shifting view that the audience received gave an almost cimematic fluidity to the action.
The gulling scene, complete with a team of painters and decorators, built to a wonderful slapstick crescendo with a paint-spattered Tennant reducing Tate to a fit of the giggles. The chemistry between them that had been so evident in Doctor Who transferred unaltered to the stage, and just like Miichael Billington in his review on The Guardian, I'd love to see them work together again in something like Private Lives.
