Much Ado About Nothing review – a riot of romcom energy
With its gorgeous music, dance and costumes, this production is a sure summer blockbuster that avoids the problematic elements of Shakespeare’s play
This elegant, effervescent production of Shakespeare’s problem play has all the markings of a sure summer blockbuster. The testy flirtation and linguistic sparring between avowed singletons Beatrice (Pippa Nixon) and Benedick (Ken Nwosu) is full of romcom energy. The comical eavesdropping that leads to their gulling is such silly fun. The music and dance is simply gorgeous; so are the costumes with their warm palette of pinks, light greys and lemons. Even Dogberry (Richard Katz, wonderfully oddball-ish) and his team of security guards wring vigorous clowning out of protracted scenes that have, in other hands, sunk the pace of this play.
The production, under Chelsea Walker’s direction, is a riot of fine staging, big on comedy, beautiful in sound and optics, adept at shifting the atmosphere, often with the help of the excellent live band (drum-like disturbances and nervy violin).
There is an overarching sense of frolics that convey this play’s sense of revelry and romance as Don Pedro (Adam Long) and his soldiers return to Messina from war, with Claudio (Joshua John) fast falling for Leonato’s daughter, Hero (Assa Kanouté), and so precipitating the dark turning point of their aborted wedding.
But it is not quite as keen to lean in to the problematic elements of the play. The animal masks of the ball of Act Two are reminiscent of those in Jamie Lloyd’s West End production and point towards the world of dark fairytale. They carry psychological undertones – so Hero holds a sheep’s head that holds the suggestion of a lamb (heading to the slaughter of her wedding) while the sharp-tongued and beady-eyed Beatrice dons the head of an eagle. But the significance of these is brief and the darkness dissipates in the face of so much fun and froth.
The cast is universally adept, particularly Nixon as the witty and stridently single Beatrice. She makes her part more tartly outraged by Benedick but still physically playful. Nwosu is a softer-edged Benedick with great comic timing, inflecting his lines with arch asides. There is certainly chemistry between them yet a lack of sting and tension in their hostilities.
There is an interesting chemistry between Don Pedro’s conniving brother, Don John (Joseph Potter) and his co-conspirator, Borachio (Marlowe Chan-Reeves) too, with a kiss that comes quite suddenly, as does a kiss between Beatrice and the messenger earlier in the play. They hint at sexual attraction but feel a little random – an unsustained idea rather than a new twist on the old story.
The aborted wedding startles with one powerful moment involving Hero’s physical humiliation, which involves their multi-tiered wedding cake. Kanouté gives a strong performance as a virtuous bride-to-be who is thunderstruck by Claudio’s accusations. But the scene does not fully swivel into stark, potentially tragic territory. And it seems resolved too tripplingly. You do not fully feel Beatrice’s enraged impotence towards Claudio (“Oh that I were a man …”) nor Hero’s pain, and does she take Claudio back in their (disguised) reunion with too much embracing gusto?
It’s a world which is abstractly modern and its modernity hangs in the air, not quite of our time in its reverberations around false charges towards women and sexual smearing. But in its charms it is winning: insuppressibly crowd-pleasing, eminently worth seeing.