Not Letting Abhorrent Men Off The Hook: Okenyo On ‘Much Ado About Nothing’

When The Music speaks to Zindzi Okenyo, she’s just hopped off her bike at Sydney’s Bell Shakespeare for week two of rehearsals for their production of Much Ado About Nothing. 

The Kenyan-Australian actor and musician stars as the headstrong Beatrice, who refuses to acknowledge her feelings for Benedick, and even calls him out for the way he and his friends treat and speak about her cousin Hero. She’s basically the closest Shakespeare gets to writing a character who is outspokenly feminist. 

Okenyo really wanted to play Beatrice as she sees the character, played in the 1993 film adaptation by Emma Thompson, as a “contemporary voice in a world of men”: “She's really fun and she's really smart and witty and she really knows herself, which I think is a beautiful quality.

“[Beatrice] seems like a very modern, contemporary feminist,” Okenyo says. “Her level of intellect, wit and ideas about the world and specifically how men behave, she often expresses them to people, especially men, and they almost understand her – but not quite.

“Her big thing is that she can't foresee being married or being with any man until men as a whole behave differently... Still, we're dealing with toxic masculinity and unpacking those aspects of society today.” 

Okenyo is sceptical of the habit of holding Shakespeare up as an almost “holy” figure. “We just say he’s the best writer and he can do no wrong or whatever,” she notes. 

It’s hard to figure out whether Shakespeare meant for Beatrice to be a progressive figure or the subject of derision. “Sometimes you look back and go, ‘Wow, this does seem quite contemporary for the 1600s,’ but I don't know whether he was that radical.

“I don't know if he was so conscious of it and so ahead of his time, because you've also got to take into account how the audience is reading the piece, and the audiences weren't up for feminist dialogue – hence the reason why I think there's not a lot of that stuff in there.”

It’s important to Okenyo – and the creative team behind Bell’s Much Ado About Nothing – that their production addresses “the fact that the men behave abhorrently... Because audiences see that stuff now, because of the conversations that we've had, [and] even how much it's evolved in the last five years.”

Director James Evans reassured Okenyo when she came on board that the production was not going to “let these men off the hook”.

“It's all about this boy culture, boys will be boys, and that no one is accountable. The father of Hero very directly says – which is such a classic thing that gets said today around men who have assaulted women, raped women, sexually harassed women – he says something along the lines of, y'know, ‘This man wouldn't lie, he wouldn't lie, these are honourable men, they wouldn't lie.’ 

“Those are the moments where I think, ‘Wow, that is actually extraordinary that it was written in the 1600s.’ Maybe it is extraordinary or it isn't, but it's definitely still happening today with pretty much those same exact lines. We hear that in the media. You can't actually shy away from that at all.” 

The question posted by Beatrice to Benedick is then whether or not he’s going to be complicit in the shitty behaviour of his toxic mates. Is he going to allow it to keep happening, or is he going to call his mates out? It’s another area that Okenyo notes men today find it difficult to come to terms with: “I don't know why, but men find it really difficult to do, today, to not leave that pack mentality.”

That problem, of truly making a story like the one told in Much Ado About Nothing – with characters like Hero, who is “slut-shamed at her own wedding” – resonate with contemporary Australia, is another thing that drew Okenyo to the role.

“I think that [Shakespeare’s] work is full of problems when you do it today, but they can be really incredible opportunities for creative problem-solving, because you can always flip things. It's interesting – how do you make a young, contemporary woman like Hero relevant and also have a voice when she has no voice?”

Still, there is a reason why Shakespeare remains so revered. Okenyo observes that the playwright is “exquisite” at “capturing humanity and what it is to love and hate and feel jealousy and sex and violence... Within this beautiful, strange poetry.”

In May this year, Okenyo dropped a new single Buckle Up, the second since the release of her debut EP, The Wave, in May last year. The hip hop track bursts with a sense of joy, complete with a bright, flirty and emphatically queer video clip. “Girl, you know I’m always down for something, all you have to do is call my name/By the way, you’re cute as fuck, so if you’re down at the green light, go and buckle up,” Okenyo sings in the chorus.

“Buckle Up I think is definitely an explosion of expression and fun,” Okenyo says.

That flirtatious element, the joy of it, seems to go hand in hand with the silliness of Shakespeare’s comedies, like Much Ado About Nothing. 

It also feels like the musicality and wordplay of Shakespeare – which comes out in this play through the banter between Beatrice and Benedick – could be something that might come naturally to Okenyo, the artist: “I guess I understand wordplay from coming from a hip hop, rap background,” she acknowledges.

We ask Okenyo how she juggles making work with a celebratory tone with the impulse to address darkness, as she does on single Hang Your Hat, which dropped in October last year and addresses the issue of casual racism in Australia.

“It’s definitely not sustainable if you’re in that dark stuff all the time,” she begins. “Why I think it's gonna be really great to do this play now is that it has so much joy and it is fun and funny and a bit stupid and there's frivolity and all of that stuff. I think if we can really amp that up and make that a really enjoyable thing then the darker stuff will really stand out.” 

Okenyo says she’s in a different place now to where she was when she was working on The Wave, and that shift has becoming apparent in the type of songs she’s writing for her next record. She’s consciously giving herself the space to play around. “I want to still say a lot with my music but I want it to be this space where I can definitely not be intellectual.

“I also realised that a lot of the stuff I do as an actor is pretty dark and it's pretty emotionally taxing and even the act of doing a show eight times a week for seven weeks or whatever, that in itself is quite exhausting – thrilling but quite exhausting.”

The timing, where she’s starting work on this production just a month after the release of the ebullient Buckle Up, Okenyo resolves is pretty uncanny. “Funny things happen, like the timing of things, and I feel like very ready to just play this character and have a lot of fun with it. “