Much Ado About Nothing Artwork.Shakespeare’s irreverent comedy opens in the idyllic town of Messina, where Leonato and his household are preparing to host Don Pedro of Aragon and his retinue. Young soldier Claudio immediately falls in love with Leonato’s shy daughter Hero, while Benedick and Beatrice, both scornful of love, clash in a battle of wits and the bitter brother Don John plots to ruin the festivities.
The production was colourful in every respect of the word, from aesthetics to tone. The set, with a backdrop of orange groves, and oranges growing from the pillars and spilling out of wooden crates, was evocative of a heady, romantic Italian summer. The costumes, Elizabethan in style, were similarly bright and bold in colour, with whimsical styles. The music embodied the tone of the performance, alternating between romantic pastoral melodies and jaunty, festive dancing tunes.
The culmination, and my favourite scene in the performance, was the masquerade ball, where the characters donned extravagant animal masks to conceal their identities and performed an elaborate, frenetic dance. I spotted several audience members clapping or swaying along - it almost felt like being at a festival.
Much Ado About Nothing is, in my opinion, Shakespeare’s funniest comedy, and Holmes’ production leaned heavily into the humour. Some of it was excessively over-the-top, with actors shouting their lines or delivering them in an exaggerated way. I resonated more with the subtler instances of comedy, such as when actors reacted to events onstage from the sidelines or broke the fourth wall to include the audience in the joke.
That being said, the clownish brand of humour worked with the performance’s light, irreverent tone and vibrant aesthetics, and made the play’s dark turn of events all the more poignant and jarring, and its happy resolution all the more rewarding. It also provoked equally over-the-top reactions from the audience, who gasped and booed at opportune moments.
Amalia Vitale’s Beatrice and Ekow Quartey’s Benedick stole the show, playing off each other with a mix of sexual tension, lightning-fast witty repartee, and a tenderness that had the audience cheering when they finally kissed. But in terms of comedy, the two highlights for me were Johnnie Broadbent’s Dogberry, with his endearingly innocent bumbling, and, John Lightbody’s Leonato, with his wry deliveries and perplexed reactions to the other characters’ antics. Another favourite was Robert Mountford’s Don John, simply because he acted as though he was a villain from one of the tragedies who had accidentally wandered into a comedy.
All in all, the show straddled the line between immersion into its setting and time period, and treating its subject matter with a modern sensibility and humour, appealing to both Shakespeare purists and those less familiar with his works. Typical of the Globe, the performance was peppered with interactive moments, where actors included audience members in the action by handing them props or addressing individuals directly with flirtations or insults. It’s something that makes standing in the yard for almost three hours, in the baking sun or pouring run, completely worth it.
