Much Ado About Nothing

Alternative title: Shakespeare Re-Told Shakespeare Retold
Synopsis: A modern television interpretation of Shakespeare’s play, with contemporary dialogue, presented as a screwball comedy and set in a provincial newsroom. Beatrice and Benedick discuss and analyse Sonnet 116 in the course of the drama.
Series: Shakespeare-Told
Language: English
Country: Great Britain
Medium: Television; Video
Technical information: Colour / Sound
Year of release: 2005
Transmission details: 7 Nov 2005 at 18:30 (Channel: BBC1)
Duration: 90 mins

Director

Brian Percival

Producer

Diederick Santer

Writer

David Nicholls

Cast

Notes: Combined on 1 DVD with the other three dramas in the series. DVD extras include cast interviews and filmographies; Shakespeare biography; Shakespeare on Film; picture gallery. Also available as a download from BBC Store
History: Shown on BBC America in August 2006.
Reviews: Wray, Ramona ‘Shakespeare and the Singletons, or, Beatrice meets Bridget Jones: Post Feminism, Popular Culture and Shakespea(Re)-Told’ in Burnett, Mark Thornton & Wray, Ramona (eds) Screening Shakespeare in the Twenty-First Century. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006. (pp 185-205).

`This woefully scripted entry in the BBC’s ShakespeaRe-Told series of modernised adaptations places Much Ado...into an inhospitable new environment and reduces it to a mirthless amalgam of second-rate sitcom and soap opera’ Rosenthal, Daniel. 100 Shakespeare Films (London: BFI, 2007), p. 158.

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British Universities Film & Video Council