(2005) "Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments." In her hotel room, from Shakespeare's Sonnet #116 Benedict Taylor (Damian Lewis) recites for Beatrice Evans (Sarah Parish), bride's matron, the lines he intends to speak as best man at the wedding of Claude (Tom Ellis) and Hero (Billie Piper); she assists with explaining their meaning.

Three years earlier Ben had stood up Beatrice at a restaurant, sending her a bottle of champagne in his absence; once again together (Ben replacing the injured Keith Fleming) as co-presenters on the Wessex Tonight regional BBC-news program, they've been snipping ("Don't call me Bea") and sniping ("joyless bitch") at each other.

At a fancy (i.e. costume) party at the home of Leonard (Martin Jarvis), the producer dressed as Caesar, Claude (sports reporter) in a suit of armor proposes to Leonard's daughter Hero, looking like Marilyn Monroe, the maid of meteorology (whose forecasts of the weather directed him to a favorable date when he first asked her out). The villain, Don (Dereck Riddell), an alcoholic recently demoted at the station and thrown over by Hero (who'd earlier pitied him), plots to make Claude jealously angry in order to hurt Hero.

Meanwhile, allowing Ben to intentionally overhear their scripted conversation, Leonard, the director Peter, Hero, and Claude convince him that Beatrice's hostility is a false front for feelings of a consuming affection. With his new appreciation of Beatrice's motivation, Ben decides, "I suppose I'll just have to love her back," and responds to her sarcasm with tender compliments.

While Beatrice unwittingly sits in a stall in the women's washroom, she overhears Hero (again intentionally) and two other girls commenting on Benedick's attractiveness and his obvious amorous intentions toward clueless Beatrice, who though still comely should be concerned about her biological clock. "People can change, can't they," Beatrice tells herself. For the wedding, Peter when she next sees him at the hotel has shaved off his goatee; they are assigned adjoining rooms.

In director Brian Percival and screenwriter David Nicholls's updated contribution to the BBC-TV's "ShakespeaRe-Told" series, the classic Elizabethan comedy turns seriously melodramatic, as Claude and Hero approach the altar, and then more convincing in its conclusion.

"If you loved me," sobs Hero, "you wouldn't do this to me!" Following the debacle inside the church, Beatrice (crying and feeling vulnerable but wanting to express her heart's desire) turns on Ben for suggesting Claude must have some reason for his conduct of accusing Hero of being "rotten goods": "Don't you dare walk away from me when I'm shouting at you!"

Refusing to relinquish his ardor for Beatrice, Ben vows: "I'm going to make everything all right." Yet the security team of Mr Berry (Anthony O'Donnell) and Vincent, his assistant, supply the explanation.

Nevertheless, all does not end well for all as Hero (more realistic than in the original play) says to a repentant Claude that he is not much different from Don in treating love as an excuse for taking possession of another. "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove: / O no! it is an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
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