A fluffy toy dog on wheels is starring at the ADC this week. His name is Crab, and had director Tom Attenborough not put together such a delicate, thoughtful, and boldly comic production of Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he might just have run away with the show altogether.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays, and with its incessant, and even jangly rhymes, it is not his best work. CAST’s decision to take the play on tour in America over the summer, before bringing it home to Cambridge, was therefore daring, especially given the acclaim that met their production of Henry V this time last year.

The play’s plot will be somewhat familiar. Valentine pursues his love Silvia from Verona to Milan. Proteus follows his friend and fellow ‘gentleman’, leaving his beloved Julia behind. Proteus promptly forgets Julia, and duly falls for Silvia. Before we know it, Julia has engaged in a spot of cross-dressing, and everyone is living happily ever after. Well, almost.

Attenborough hasn’t indulged the gentlemen lovers half as much as Shakespeare does, and the two servants, Lance and Speed, very nearly upstage their betters. Josh Higgott’s Lance is roundly melancholy; a sort of comic Jaques. Higgott appeared in last year’s Footlights show, Theseus and the Minotaur, and his comic expertise is transferred seamlessly to this production. Whenever he has the stage to himself, with Crab literally in tow, the whole play is put on hold while his comic turns play themselves out. When Lance hoists three grudging members of the audience onto the stage to act out the wailing household he is describing, the effect is that of a Sacha Baron Cohen comedy: at once hilarious and excruciatingly embarrassing to witness. It is certainly brave.

Katherine Press as Julia forms a piercing, subtle rapport with the audience, though her paroxysm of weeping when she realises Proteus has deserted her comes on all too suddenly, and jars with her otherwise sensitively judged performance. Jack Monaghan’s nervy Proteus captures that character’s latent nastiness well, though his stuttering delivery is too well honed and too consistent to convince wholly. Overall the acting is lithe and professional, and Joe Bannister as Valentine embodies these qualities.

Productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona live or die on how they react when Valentine offers Sylvia to Proteus, just moments after he has prevented Proteus from raping her. As Valentine gives Sylvia away in this production, he fingers the crucifix that hangs around his neck. Attenborough should be applauded for attempting to make sense, with this touch, of a turn of events that usually does no more than revolt and perplex modern audiences. 

The menace is palpable when Sylvia, lost in a forest, is harried by bandits wielding strange leafy umbrellas. The white dress Sylvia wears as she narrowly avoids being raped has scarlet flowers sewn into it. CAST’s comedy, already fired up by the vibrant Italian music played between scenes, is set alight by these dark sparks. 

Till 10 October 2009