WCXX

As in Mad Men, but at play rather than at work, the chic, eroticised characters are forever pouring whisky in that special manner, unique to American films, where it sloshes about in the glass and they do not add water. The rooms are a bit crowded, the bedrooms borrowed. It makes sense that love is both the chief subject of people's thoughts and that they keep misunderstanding it.

In this idiom, almost everything works. The painful scene where Claudio, about to marry Hero, suddenly denounces her for the fornication that she has not in fact committed, is rendered brilliantly effective by setting the abortive wedding ceremony on the lawn of the villa. Suddenly, the guests who have all been cooing about young love make little, shocked, Californian noises. One feels not only horror at the injustice done to Hero, but ordinary social embarrassment, as if one was actually there. It helps that Hero (Jillian Morgese) is touchingly pretty and reminds one of Samantha Cameron, and that Claudio (Fran Kanz) is a bit of a dull-eyed fratboy.

As for Dogberry (Nathan Fillion), so often a tedious example of how Shakespeare's humour has dated, Whedon rescues him from the musty archive of dead drollery and turns him into a wonderfully lumbering security man with LAPD-style ambitions, tubbily self-important in his own stupidity. There is one aspect of the plot in which Whedon's modern mores might seem to do violence to the original. We know from the play that Beatrice (Amy Acker) has had a failed relationship with Benedick (Alexis Denisof), but Whedon elaborates this to assert that they have actually slept together. The first shot of the film is of Benedick getting out of Beatrice's bed, trying not to wake her, and slipping out of the flat.

Given that much of the plot turns on the idea that Hero would not commit the unthinkable wickedness of surrendering her virginity to another before marriage, this twist might seem jarringly at odds with the rest of the drama. After all, we are supposed to end up thinking well of Beatrice and Benedick, according to Tudor moral expectations. Non-marital sex is inconsistent with this.

Yet it works. Benedick emerges as what we nowadays call commitment-phobic, and Beatrice's sarcastic anger becomes explicable. Hero's virtue consists not so much in her virginity per se as in her fidelity to Claudio. It all makes modern sense. And so, in the playful, joshing atmosphere of the long party, does the re-emergence of their love and the way the guests contrive that each should learn how the other feels. Suddenly, it all becomes very moving, enough to bring unexpected tears.

Much as I love traditional theatrical conventions, there is no doubt that the weight of what has happened in the past can make Shakespeare difficult to perform. Actors and directors can seem too conscious of this, striving either to respect the canon too much, or to break with it too arrogantly. The same often applies to the audience. Some of us (me, for example) want our Shakespeare done "properly", and so we fuss too much about what doesn't really matter. Others find the whole idea of his greatness too intimidating and can't get past the fustian to the real thing.

So I cannot recommend too strongly these laid-back Americans who stroll in, take up the script, and immediately make it their own.