Much Ado About Nothing
Shakespeare’s Globe launches its summer season with this sparkling staging of one of the bard’s best comedies. It’s a sun-drenched spectacle that makes full use of the theatre’s crowd-pleasing openness and opportunity for audience interaction. Of course, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ as a play has one of Shakespeare’s wildest tonal whiplashes. It begins as a frothy romcom, following Don Pedro and his soldiers as they shack up with Leonatio in his idyllic home in Messina and of course the lightning-sharp banter between Benedick and Leonato’s niece, Beatrice. But in the secodn half it’s all change with false allegations of infidelity aimed at Leonato’s daughter, Hero, her faked death and sworn revenge. The cleverness of Globe associate artistic director Sean Holmes’s production is to steer even harder into the comedy in the first half, as paradoxical as that seems. Here, Hero’s paramour Claudio isn’t (as he can be) a blandly second-string romantic lead; in Adam Wadsworth’s delightfully puppyish performance, he’s a manchild full of ridiculous bluster. He and the rest of Don Pedro’s pals are like lads on a night out: full of idiotic big talk. It’s a deliciously merciless portrayal. The scene where they try to convince Benedick that Beatrice loves him, plays out as if they’ve never actually met a woman. The consequence of these clownish levels of testosterone is to sharpen how inadequate these smugly self-assured men are when they’re duped by Don Pedro’s brother into believing that He