The latest in a long line of Benedicks is Derek Jacobi. The director, Terry Hands, has set the play in the early seventeenth century in Cavalier costume. It was Derek Jacobi's first stage role after two years of television, and he found it "frightening." "I still suffer from nerves but the horror is not so bad. That is in part because I find comedy, and certainly Shakespearean comedy, very difficult and Benedick needs to be played very much from up front. But he does build up a marvelous rapport with the audience, especially when he gets to the soliloquies...and that is when an actor starts to revel in it.

"It is a very curious thing about the Benedick and Beatrice plot. It is the Claudio/Hero one which is supposed to be the principal plot of the play but it never feels like that. The audience wants to know the outcome of the relationship between the other two. I love the play, particularly in this production, for its blatant romanticism. It has glamour, beautiful music, laughter and tears,...and it is not just a frivolous comedy, it has depth to it. It has a very black side and that black contrasts with the other colours. It is not just a piece of tinsel.

"I think there is a good deal in the play which suggests there has been a very serious affair between Beatrice and Benedick at some time in the past. Beatrice right from the beginning can talk of nobody else but Benedick. She's obsessed with him. Everything she says shows she is dreadfully smitten with the man and that he really did treat her very lightly. As she says when Don Pedro tells her she has 'lost the heart of Signior Benedick'---'Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile; and I gave him use for it--a double heart for his single one: marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.' There's a touch of the 'hell hath no fury' there.

"There has been a kind of tradition recently to play the parts as a couple well on the shelf, finding each other almost at the last possible moment, with Beatrice in particular as a real old maid. That is a plausible interpretation, but it's not exclusive. Sinead Cusack and I play the lovers as being somewhat younger, so that it is believable that during the play they suffer a very violent attraction to each other. I think at the outset the real attraction is on the side of Beatrice. It's not that she's not married because she couldn't get a decent fellow, it is that for her none of the possible suitors has matched up to Benedick.

"It's different for Benedick. I felt marriage was rather thrust upon him. He never had the same interest she had in him, or the same problems about the possibility of marriage which she seems to have. His dawning realization can come in two ways. When he catalogues what he would want in a wife he says, 'Rich she shall be, that's certain;..wise, or I'll none;.. virtuous, or I'll never cheapen her;.. fair, or I'll never look on her;.. mild, or come not near me;.. noble, or not I for an angel;.. of good discourse, an excellent musician,...and her hair shall be....of what colour it please God.' Now it can mean that he is just describing a woman so amazing she could never exist, so he will never marry. But the other idea we explored during rehearsal, was that as he begins to catalogue all these virtues it gradually begins to dawn on him that he is describing someone he knows and that when he gets to the colour of her hair he realizes it is Beatrice, and so finishes it off quickly without saying the colour, leaving it at 'what colour it please God.'

"By the end of the play Beatrice and Benedick have far outstripped their lightweight companions. They have been on a journey, both of them, and have emerged different in many ways and are far more mature. I think it very important when it comes to Hero's rejection and Beatrice asks Benedick to kill Claudio that this should be taken very seriously and should not get a laugh. Dame Peggy [Ashcroft], when she saw our production, praised particularly the fact that we did not get a laugh on that line. She had herself striven hard not to do so. She said that Sir John [Gielgud] then DID get a laugh on his reply, 'Not for all the world..', but she felt it was splendid that neither of us got a laugh, for by this time neither the situation not the play is at all funny. When Benedick actually challenges Claudio to a duel over Hero then it has become very sick indeed, very nasty and very dark. It's remarkable that somehow all this can be forgotten by the end of the play and the two men part with a handshake.

"But by the end of the play Benedick is seeing his immature companions much more as Beatrice does. They have become very tedious, and indeed most effete. The practical jokes and the cheap comments and the way they treated Hero are not admirable, and are certainly not funny. They are very vain too. They may well have been brave, had valour as the text suggests but, both at the time Shakespeare was writing and the period in which we set our production, men's clothes were extremely luxurious, all silks and velvets and lace. Men were peacocks. I think this is something that Beatrice just couldn't bear.

"Finally, I think it is terribly important that at the end the two of them are seen to be really besotted by each other. They are real people and they care about each other very deeply. You feel it's never going to be roses, roses all the way for them. Both still have their extraordinary intellects which will crash against each other, both are very independent, but they will survive. Their joint sense of humour is the great saving grace in their relationship."