In his directional debut with the American Shakespeare Festival, Peter Gill has come up with a winner. His Much Ado About Nothing is quite something--both for the ear and the eye. Bernard Shaw referred to the work as "Much Adoodle-do" and branded it "a shocking bad play." That's going too far. But it is a minor work. Its borrowed main plot is preposterous and flawed; and Shakespeare was pretty careless now and then (twice he even calls for Leonato's wife Innogen to come on stage, though she neither speaks nor is ever spoken to or about).

Yet we must not be too hard on Much Ado. Just as Shakespeare needed the experience of writing the inferior Love's Labour's Lost before he could produce this middling play, he had to write Much Ado and the similarly middling As You Like It before he was able to follow them up with the miraculous gem he called Twelfth Night. Still, Gill and his charges had me believing for a stretch of two-and-a-half hours that Much Ado is really a good play--and that is no mean achievement.

The keyword to both the play and this production is balance. Much Ado, like the other plays in Shakespeare's Renaissance style (as opposed to his Mannerist and Baroque styles), exhibited a good deal of symmetry. The central tragicomic Claudio-Hero plot is balanced by the high comedy of Beatrice and Benedick and the low comedy of Dogberry and Verges. The evil bastard Don John is a foil to his genial legitimate brother Don Pedro; and these young brothers contrast with the older-generation brothers Antonio and Leonato. Don John's two male attendants (Borachio and Conrade) balance. Hero's female ones (Margaret and Ursula). Claudio and Hero, on one hand, and Beatrice and Benedick, on the other, both find a rocky road to the wedding altar; and the two plots involving these pairs both hinge on deception and credulousness.

Even before any players appear on the Festival stage, the audience is confronted by balance in the form of Ed Wittstein's setting. In upstage center stands an imposing depressed segmental arch suggestive of some oversize fireplace. Its Ionic flanking columns hold up a gabled brick wall, with a set of cyma recta consoles supporting a three-arch window that sheds lambent light through its variegated diamond panes. Some distance to the right and left of this centerpiece are placed smaller diagonal arched doorways. When the garden scenes arrive, a section of brick wall and a bench roll in symmetrically from each side. And for a few indoor scenes, there are set up symmetrically a pair of folding screens, on each of which--in a cute reference to the play's title--is lettered the motto "Exnihilo nihil."

For all the balance in the sets and in the play's structure, however, Shakespeare did not achieve balance in the quality of his text. An objective inspection of the script indicates that he seems not to have had his heart in the Claudio-Hero plot he borrowed from elsewhere. His chief achievement in the play are precisely those things he had to invent himself: the witty verbal skirmishing between Beatrice and Benedick, and the portrait of bureaucratic officialdom represented by the malapropistic Dogberry and his sorry crew. (Shaw is about the only person who has denied the wit of the high comedy, perhaps because Beatrice and Benedick so closely resemble some of the most famous characters in Shaw's own plays.)

Furthermore, there is an unusual imbalance in the proportion of prose to poetry; Much Ado has fewer lines of verse than any other work in the canon except the farcical Merry Wives of Windsor. And the best writing in the play is in prose.

Beatrice and Benedick, then, are far and away the most engrossing personages in the play. And even in productions in which the serious plot is tedious, it is essential that the man and woman who play this sharp-tongued pair be evenly matched--otherwise the result is fatally unbalanced.

Now the Festival has offered Much Ado twice before. In 1957 Alfred Drake was the most brilliant Benedick I've ever seen (perhaps partly because Drake is also a singer); but Katharine Hepburn was just no match for him. Then Philip Bosco was a magnificently vibrant Benedick in 1964, but Jacqueline Brookes couldn't come close.

In the current third try, fortunately, Charles Cioffi and Patricia Elliott balance each other beautifully. Cioffi's performance is not up to Drake's or Bosco's, but it is very good all the same; and Miss Elliott's is almost the equal of the delectable Beatrice that Rosemary Harris once played opposite Barry Morse (also an even match).

Director Gill has done more, however, than provide two balanced leads shining against a dull background. His surprising accomplishment has been to elicit a new kind of balance: somehow he has managed to pull the rest of his cast up to the level of his Beatrice and Benedick, almost to a man. Although the text rises and sags, all the component groups of characters come across on a rather evenly balanced level; it is this that makes the play seem better than it really is. This Much Ado is a real company show. Just about everyone speaks cleanly, crisply, intelligibly, and with adequate projection; and there are precious few of those unintentionally ear-assaulting vowels that mar most large-cast Shakespearean productions.

There is some variation, of course. Tony Thomas' Messenger is too studied in speech. On the other hand, the best delivery in the whole show comes from William Glover's warm Leonato; so skillful is he that he sounds as though he had spoken nothing but Shakespearean English all his life.

As Claudio, the young lover more in love with love than with Hero, Robert Foxworth is more light-footed and sympathetic than the ninny he plays deserves. As Hero, whom he unjustifiably denounces at the altar, Roberta Maxwell improves as the show proceeds--though Shakespeare has kept her silent many times when she ought to be vocal. Len Cariou's honest Pedro, Wyman Pendleton's pipe-smoking Antonio, June Prud'-homme's loudmouthed Ursula, Mary Doyle's saucy Margaret, Tony Van Bridge's apoplectic Dogberry, James Greene's perceptive Friar, and most of the lesser parts are in highly capable hands. Of the latter, William Hickey's Second Watch is a wonderfully funny simpleton.

As the evil Don John, who is the cause of all the trouble, Michael McGuire is aptly sourfaced. At the play's end, when John is reported to have been captured in flight and brought back, Benedick says, "Think not on him till tomorrow." But director Gill brings John on stage at once to participate merrily in the concluding festive dance. This is a glaring mistake; John is not to be so readily forgiven, nor exempted from the "brave punishments" Benedick promises to devise.

Gill's direction in general is admirably inventive, and he maintains a pace that is swift without bring pellmell. (I could do without the second intermission, too, which would leave the show in two sections of 60 and 75 minutes.) Particularly amusing are the two garden scenes, in which Benedick and Beatrice in turn are intentionally allowed to overhear the contrived conversation of others.

Throughout the show the eye is ravished by a constant series of breathtakingly beautiful Renaissance costumes, designed by Jane Greenwood. For the men, the colors run largely to browns, with a healthy admixture of white and black. The women wear very wide farthingales, which are the sources of a good deal of comic business. And one must not overlook Thomas Skelton's helpful lighting.

Al Carmines has provided modern but quite tonal music of light weight. "Sigh no more, ladies," sung by Balthasar (Frederick Rivera) to the on stage accompaniment of a genuine seven-course lute, is supported in the background by a group of men singing in harmony, whose major-minor shifts are charming. The solemn song near the end, "Pardon, goddess of the night," has been turned into a men's trio, with off-stage instrumental accompaniment.

Don't look for anything more in this play than pure entertainment. As such, however, this production is the most nearly satisfying Much Ado in my experience.