#john webster

Much Ado About Nothing (2011) at Shakespeare's Globe

"With two star performances by Charles Edwards and Eve Best, both highly skilled at milking the audience for laughs, the production, full of inventive comic business, delighted the large, predominantly young audience. The production was punctuated with spontaneous applause from the audience at several points, notably Benedick's 'The world must be peopled' (2.3.229–30) and the couple's climactic clinch at 'Peace, I will stop your mouth' (5.4.97). [...] Eve Best as Beatrice matched him in comic skills and charisma, and, with clever directorial touches, involved members of the audience as unwilling participants in her soliloquies, delivered from the very front of the stage. [...] Beatrice's response, 'Kill Claudio', to Benedick's 'Come, bid me do anything for thee' (4.1.289–90), got a big laugh from the audience, but it was played as straightforward farce, without the sudden shift in tone. Beatrice's 'O God that I were a man! I would eat his heart in the market place' in the same scene (4.1.307–8), was also played for laughs in this production, ignoring any serious issues that may be raised – and passing up any opportunity to bring out thematic links between main plot and subplot. [...] It gave its two lead actors great opportunities to demonstrate their talents. But both Charles Edwards and Eve Best seemed at times to be acting in a vacuum. Of the parallel scenes where Beatrice and Benedick are gulled into falling in love with one another, the first, with splendid comic business provided for the eavesdropping Benedick, worked beautifully, where the second, where Eve Best had little to do, was generally a missed opportunity. [...] a production dominated to an unusual extent by its stars."

— Chernaik, Warren. 2012. "Review of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (Directed by Jeremy Herrin) at Shakespeare's Globe, London 26 May 2011." Shakespeare 8 (2): 262–63.

"Eve Best's excellent Beatrice hides behind linens left to bleach in the sun when she eavesdrops upon Hero and Ursula. When she learns that Benedic loves her, she pops from behind a sheet. In an instant foreshadowing the comedy's happy close, Beatrice is crowned by the most extraordinary and erotically suggestive of domestic things: the bed linen. Here Herrin charges ordinary objects and movements with revelatory power."

— Macfie, Pamela Royston. "Shakespearean spectacles in London and Stratford," Sewanee Review 120, no. 1 (2012): 118-XVIII.

"Of course, the real center of gravity, as it were, of the play's comic dimension is the 'merry war' (1.1.59) of words between Benedick and Beatrice. Eve Best played Shakespeare's acerbic female lead with aplomb, goading Benedick as she tiptoed around the stage ponds with deftness and delicacy. It was a winning combination of iron fist and velvet glove. [...] Mike Britton's design pushed the stage (again) out into the pit. Into the stage extension were set four shallow triangular ponds. Their function was not entirely clear though, as mentioned above, the narrow strip of stage downstage of the ponds provided a tiny walkway across which Beatrice stepped, half tightrope walker, half ballet dancer, her graceful movement contrasting nicely with her scabrous invective. [...] During Beatrice's prying, she hid under a blanket suspended from a washing line and traversed the stage to keep up with the gossip. Both sequences were comically effective, culminating respectively in Benedick's 'This can be no trick' (2.3.209), timed to perfection, and Beatrice's 'I / Believe it' (3.1.115-16) at which she knelt at the edge of the stage and embraced one of the groundlings in a gesture of solidarity, a moment both touching and jocular."

— Smith, Peter J. "The 2011 Season at London's Globe Theatre." The Upstart Crow (Clemson) 30 (2011): 69.

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— Caldwell, William Casey. "The Comic Structure of the Globe: History, Direct Address, and the Representation of Laughter in a Reconstructed Playhouse." Shakespeare Bulletin 31, no. 3 (2013): 375–403.

"Looking at the three screened 'Kill Claudio' scenes together, all three elicit a laugh from the crowd. In the case of the Globe, the motivation of the laugh is clear because Eve Best appears to be playing for one. In the other two cases, even though Catherine Tate and Michelle Terry both play Beatrice as a comic character via physical comedy throughout their respective filmed performances, neither appears to be playing 'Kill Claudio' for a laugh. And yet the audience laughs regardless. Laughter deriving from sudden surprise? From shock at the hyperbole of the request? I still do not understand it."

— Sullivan, Joseph. "Teaching 'Kill Claudio' in the Age of Streamed Shakespeare." Much Ado About Nothing and the New Awareness (2023): 191.

The Duchess of Malfi (2012) at the Old Vic

"The Old Vic mounted this much-needed major revival of Webster's play using a lavish visual design, an impressive soundscape, and the commercial asset of casting Eve Best in the title role. [...] The appearance of the Duchess was delayed until the stage was cleared after Bosola's conversation with the Cardinal, at which point Antonio returned with Delio, drinking and joking, describing to him the wonders of the Duchess's speech. The doors at the back of the stage opened, showing the Duchess's silhouette against a halo of white light. She entered accompanied by more masked figures carrying candles. Despite her powerful stage presence and skilled command of the audience, constantly and effectively breaking the fourth wall, Eve Best proved to be an uneven Duchess. She was warm and charming in her loving intimacy with Antonio during their playful wooing in 1.1 and the unusually tender bedchamber scene (3.2), but emotionally detached when she was shown the wax figures of her supposedly dead husband and child (4.1). It was difficult to see the character here, as one would assume that the loss of her eldest son and her beloved Antonio would provoke a more poignant reaction; but Best just turned her back on the horrific vision. In that scene, however, the audience witnessed one of the strongest moments in the production: when the Duchess said 'Take hence the lights' Ferdinand delivered Antonio's supposed severed hand to her in an almost completely darkened auditorium—even the emergency exit lights were covered by the theatre's ushers—placing the suggestive power of the scene on the language. [...] In the subsequent death scene (4.2), she appeared subdued and peaceful, in sober acceptance of her fate, which seems a plausible and appropriate reading; it resulted in an extremely moving sequence whose climax, the Duchess's death by strangulation, was one of the most shocking moments of the production, carefully choreographed as a slow and painful process. The Duchess died looking at Bosola. [...] Interestingly, the director chose to make explicit Ferdinand's underlying sexual desire for the Duchess: he attempted to assault his sister sexually during their encounter in 3.2. She avoided the assault with dignity while he tried to regain command of his behavior, obviously ashamed of what he had tried to do. [...] Tom Bateman provided a convincing portrayal of the young steward newly arrived to the Aragonian court—despite the fact that all references to his 'horsemanship,' so key to the early characterization of the part, were omitted—and seduced by the powerful femininity of the Duchess. [...] He managed to develop an appropriately warm relationship with Tunji Kasim's Delio, especially moving in 5.3, where a hooded Duchess re-entered at the top gallery to voice the echo. [...] Some light touches of stylization—the dances, the final appearance of the Duchess in a halo of white light, recalling the beginning of the show—complemented a conventional, but fundamentally valid take on the play that occasionally missed the point by under-developing some of the characters."

— Díez, José A. Pérez, and Jamie Lloyd. The Duchess of Malfi, by The Old Vic. Shakespeare Bulletin 30, no. 4 (2012): 653–56.

"[...] And Jamie Lloyd's lucid and intelligent production is well worth the wait, not least for the outstanding central performance of Eve Best as the Duchess and the comparative novelty of seeing a seventeenth-century play in a proscenium arch format. Best's Duchess is both an imperious aristocrat and an appealingly human lover, [...] The play is remarkable not only for the qualities of its language ('I am Duchess of Malfi still'; 'Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle: she died young'), [...] in a stylized opening sequence, Ferdinand, the Cardinal and the Duchess are displayed to the audience and their characters sketched out by Antonio and Delio; [...]. The initial entrance of the Duchess from the door at the back of the stage is mirrored in her first appearance after the interval, in Act Four. The change in her status is marked in a change of costume, and the effect of backlighting on her plain white petticoat is almost to anatomize her, just as Bosola and Ferdinand attempt to assess her mental state. The production is also alert to the extent to which characters in The Duchess of Malfi perform themselves, at times almost speaking in quotation marks. This quality is especially marked in the Duchess's two great set-piece expressions of defiance, where Best plays with the formal qualities of the language. At the end of Act Three, just before the interval, she stands at the centre of the stage and recounts her long fable of the salmon and the dog-fish. The story concludes with the statement 'So to great men the moral may be stretched: / Men oft are valued high, when th'are most wretched', and Best draws out the extra syllable in 'stretch-ed', making us expect and even desire the concluding rhyme in the following line. In controlling her language, this Duchess controls and defines her own identity. [...] The Duchess's death by strangulation is agonizingly prolonged: her cries and her desperate, involuntary spasms lingered in the memory long after the play was over. [...]"

— Munro, Lucy. "Slightly Askew". TLS (1969), no. 5692 (2012): 18.

"In the intervening decades, most of Britain's theatrical luminaries have done major work [at the Old Vic], and to their number can now be added the name of Eve Best, currently starring in The Duchess of Malfi. [...] In his brilliantly imaginative production at the Old Vic, Jamie Lloyd has, in Eve Best, an actress who has the commanding power to give these lines their full resonance, their power to thrill us with the potential of human integrity and strength in a limitlessly corrupt world. [...] Best's Duchess, intelligent, witty, sexy, humane, vibrantly alive until she is so hideously dead, has been of such an order as to make us believe in the depth of the evil Ferdinand’s horror and sense of loss, even though he has ordered her death. A great Duchess must inhabit these first two lines and justify the pain of the third. Best has no problem in meeting these demands. But this remarkable central performance is far from being the whole show. [...] the stage is set for horror. It is also set for the Duchess's first appearance, bathed in light as she enters this bullring of corruption. If the horrors, including a mock-up of the hanging of Antonio, the Duchess's steward whom she has secretly married, and her son, not to speak of her own strangulation, are done with frightening verisimilitude, there are also accesses of the most touching affection. Her scenes with Antonio have both warmth and passion – Eve Best and Tom Bateman create in these roles a sense of loving partnership – and her scenes with her servant, Cariola (engagingly played by understudy Lucy Eaton when I saw it), suggest a friendship that cuts across the social gulf between them. These moments attest to the possibilities of human devotion even when up against boundless cruelty and evil."

— McFarlane, Brian. "Alive and well in London." (2012).

Antony and Cleopatra (2014) at Shakespeare's Globe

"If we consider realism as an art not of plenitude but of omission and irony, then the lovers emerged as the key realist subjects of both Munby's and van Hove's productions. In these stagings, the Roman general and the Egyptian Queen could match Caesar's flair for public relations, but their more presentational moments were framed as parodic role-playing. For instance, in the first scene of Munby's production Antony (Clive Wood) reacted to the presence of Rome's ambassadors by wooing Cleopatra (Eve Best) in a deliberately hyperbolic manner, performing his enslavement by effusively praising her as one whose 'every passion fully strives / To make itself, in thee, fair and admired!' (1.1.52-3). Best's Cleopatra mocked his performance, loudly blowing a raspberry, whereupon Wood's Antony affected to obey her command to 'hear the ambassadors' (1.1.49) by goose-stepping up to Philo, throwing an arm around him, and then slapping his cheek. As he and Cleopatra ran away, laughing, it became clear that they used such play-acting both to discomfit their political adversaries and to spoof their own scandalous personae. [...] A similar pattern marked the final movement of Munby's Antony and Cleopatra, in which Eve Best in particular played heightened passages in tones of extreme quiet and restraint. She greeted Antony's death with one of Shakespeare's most exquisitely hyperbolic speeches: [4.16.66-70]. Clasping Antony in her arms, Best spoke these celebrated lines numbly and with such extreme restraint as to be almost inaudible, so that when Charmian cried, 'O, quietness, lady!' (4.16.71), she seemed to be commenting upon her mistress's demeanor rather than striving to calm it. Similarly, when Cleopatra told Dolabella of her dream of 'an Emperor Antony' whose 'legs bestrid the ocean' (5.3.75, 81), Best spoke under her breath, more as if offering the audience temporary access to her inward emotional response than as if enunciating a magnificent public elegy to a godlike beloved. For most reviewers, Best's restraint had great emotional power. To be sure, a few censured her lack of heroic stature, Michael Arfitti, for instance, complained that she 'threaten[ed] to "unpeople Egypt" as though proposing to deadhead the roses.' But Paul Taylor applauded the 'exquisitely understated manner in which Best negotiate[d] the various indignities littering Cleopatra's path to apotheosis' ('Antony') while Andrzej Lukowski saw her as the key agent in a production that brought 'Shakespeare's gorgeously written melodrama down to earth in the best sort of way.' Lukowski's praise epitomizes the successful 'marriage' of the 'two traditions'—the 'gorgeously written' and heightened drama of Shakespeare's play-text wed to the 'down to earth' realism of the actor—that a performance such as Best's can embody for contemporary spectators. Within the context of Munby's and van Hove's productions, this 'marriage' had political significance. Both stagings underlined the contrast between Antony and Cleopatra's deliberate lack of grandiosity on the one hand, and the declamatory quality of Caesar on the other. Where Best's Cleopatra responded to Antony's death so quietly that the groundlings in the Globe had to strain to intrude upon her apparently private grief, Coy's Caesar made political hay from his rival's passing. [...]"

— Barker, Roberta. 'Deared by Being Lacked'—The Realist Legacy and the Art of Failure in Shakespearean Performance. The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, 57-61.

"Eve Best's hand gestures were large and animated at times, small and still at other times, but always able to convey the modulations in Cleopatra's passions, Cleopatra being a character who Bridget Escolme argues experiences her emotions in 'excess.' The gentle movement of her fingers as her hand would stretch towards Clive Wood's Antony or as she extended her arm, shoulder to fingertip, toward the audience, invited the audience to see why Julius Caesar himself so often 'rained kisses' upon it (3.13.89). In the Globe Theatre performance of the same production, the gestures of the hand were not that different, but the effects of them were: large gestures, for example, seemed more reverberant and widely dispersed, moving like sound waves around the outdoor theatre; smaller gestures had a magnetic effect as audiences drew in toward Best's performances of stillness. Her gestures contributed to the production's overall effect which Paul Taylor characterized in The Independent as 'exquisitely understated.'"

— Karim-Cooper, Farah. "Lively Action". The Hand on the Shakespearean Stage: Gesture, Touch and the Spectacle of Dismemberment. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016.

"[...]If theatre directors continue to centralise whiteness in their readings of the play, however, it in many ways replicates Caesar's triumph over Egypt. We relive Cleopatra's defeat every time we watch a white woman play her—due respect to Dames Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Harriet Walter, and Eve Best. But we begin to see more clearly the Egyptian Queen's own prophetic vision as she chose to end her life on her own terms. She imagined herself being performed for years to come by actors who do not resemble her in any way—and that is, for the most part, what has happened."

— Karim-Cooper, Farah. "Mythologising the Tawny Queen." The Great White Bard: How to Love Shakespeare While Talking About Race. 1st ed. (US). Viking: An Imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, 2023.

A Woman of No Importance (2017) at the Vaudeville Theatre

"The brisk common sense and detached amusement with which [Emma Fielding's Mrs Allonby's] witty observations are delivered leaves it hard to imagine her deigning to play the role of the whimsical and tyrannical prima donna she describes, or tolerating for long any man who treated her as such. Similar tensions play around Eve Best's Mrs Arbuthnot, a Pre-Raphaelite magdalen with unruly auburn-red locks and flowing velvet gowns, who first enters with a picturesque basket of fresh flowers and vegetables on her arm, presumably the produce of her cottage garden. These Pre-Raphaelite looks seem to be intended as a marker of her sincerity and true feeling, and her florid and highly coloured speeches are delivered in a rush and tumult of emotion. This is the key-note of Dromgoole's interpretation, but not altogether a successful one. [...] Dominic Dromgoole's solution to the stylistic unevenness of A Woman of No Importance is to treat it as an Ibsenite realist drama, presenting even its highest moments of melodramatic rhetoric and confrontation as sincere emotional truth. This approach provides some interestingly original moments, most notably when Eve Best greets her son's demand that she marry his father with a burst of helpless laughter. Best's emotionally impulsive style is at its most effective in the gleeful triumph with which she celebrates Gerald's rejection of Lord Illingworth. Almost breaking into a victory dance, Mrs Arbuthnot becomes the winner in this battle of the sexes, a crusading warrior defeating the sexual double standard. Approaching the melodramatic elements of the play as Ibsenite social commentary can prove effective; as when Mrs Arbuthnot stands powerless and speechless between her lover and her son, unable to explain her objections. Her silence can be read as that of a woman gagged by the dominant power of gender and class; there is no suggestion of self-torturing guilt, of a woman condemned by the punitive morality she has exposed for herself and her son. Dromgoole's production instead presents Mrs Arbuthnot as the straightforward victim of a corrupt society. Mrs Arbuthnot's long speeches remain inescapably problematic, however. Best may dash precipitately through the words themselves, but it is hard to accept as a child of nature woman who describes her son as a god-sent ewe-lamb. Her long agonised speech on the trials of motherhood is similarly out-of-kilter when shorn of either the emotional excess of a self-tortured woman or the rhetorical distance of a more stylised delivery. Without a sense of Mrs Arbuthnot's agonised conscience and her urge to self-immolation, her dramatic account of maternal suffering seems, rather ludicrously, to paint motherhood itself as a form of epic martyrdom."

— Eltis, Sos. "A Wo Man of No Importance: A Review of the Classic Spring Theatre Company Production at the Vaudeville Theatre." A Woman of No Importance, by Vaudeville Theatre. The Wildean, no. 52 (2018): 115–20.

"Having read Sos Eltis's review of the Classic Spring Theatre Company's production of A Woman of No Importance in the previous issue, I would like to offer a different perspective. This may seem redundant, given that the production has closed, but I think exploring the choices director (and Wilde season producer) Dominic Dromgoole made with Woman should make us all excited about the rest of the season. [...] At the heart of the play, Eve Best brought a real fire to Mrs Arbuthnot, showing the pain, the anguish and ultimately the joy that seems rare in Wilde adaptations. She grounded the play's politics in a highly emotional and affecting transformation. One can't help but think Wilde would have approved of a production that seduced audiences with star casting and period glamour, then slashed away at their own culture. Dromgoole could have played it more softly and subtly, but it's an angry play. By refusing to sugar-coat that anger with wit – by putting the anger center-stage and letting it roar – Dromgoole and his stellar cast gave the world our first post-Weinstein Wilde."

— Sullivan, Darcy. "A Woman of #MeToo Importance." The Wildean, no. 53 (2018): 67–68.

"[Lady Windermere's Fan] also has less heart – Eve Best brought searing pain and radiant love to Mrs. Arbuthnot, and there isn't simply any opportunity for Burke's cast, good as they are, to do the same."

— Sullivan, Darcy. "Lady Windermere's Fan: A Review of the Classic Spring Theatre Company Production at the Vaudeville Theatre." Lady Windermere's Fan, by Kathy Burke. The Wildean, no. 53 (2018): 101–3.

"[Dominic Dromgoole] directed the magnificent Eve Best in a moving opening production of A Woman of No Importance and [...]"

— Whelan, Robert. "Classic Spring: A Symposium." The Wildean, no. 54 (2019): 106–9.

"A Woman of No Importance would not have worked nearly so well without Eve Best in a nakedly emotional performance as Mrs. Arbuthnot, aglow with sincerity."