'Much Ado About Nothing' review — this glorious production is the Globe at its very best

Read our review of Much Ado About Nothing, starring Ken Nwosu and Pippa Nixon, now in performances at Shakespeare's Globe to 24 October.

Summary

• Much Ado About Nothing plays at Shakespeare's Globe
• This joyful production is the Globe at its very best
• Ken Nwosu brings clarion delivery and physical dexterity to Benedick
• Pippa Nixon is truthful and winning as Beatrice

There seems to be a particular alchemy between Much Ado About Nothing and Shakespeare’s Globe. Fifteen years ago, Eve Best and Charles Edwards led a sublime production that seemed to define this gloriously mercurial comedy at this Bankside address for the better part of a generation.

And lo and behold, along comes the director Chelsea Walker with a fresh Much Ado that belongs to the here and now and is alive to the shifting tonal eddies of this most prismatic of texts. Making her main stage debut at a venue where she has previously directed only indoors, Walker brings wit, incisiveness and vigour to a play shot through with those very qualities. Oh, and a generous dollop of heart.

On the one hand, Shakespeare here proffers a romcom in Elizabethan embryo, positing a couple who must surmount numerous hurdles before they can seal the L word with a hard-won kiss. The more Benedick (Ken Nwosu) and Beatrice (Pippa Nixon) banish thoughts of matrimony, the more we know – even if they don’t yet – that their eventual commingling will help prove the play’s closing precept that “man is a giddy thing”. They’ve been round the block with one another before and won’t on this occasion let opportunity slip away.

But as is often true of Shakespearean comedy, storm clouds gather, darkening the marriage to Claudio (Joshua John) of Beatrice’s young cousin and dear friend, Hero (Assa Kanouté). Scarcely has the villainous Don John (Joseph Potter) seen fit to cast Hero’s fidelity into doubt, before the play’s men – her own father, Leonato, included – collectively take it as given that this demure young woman is some sort of strumpet.

The men’s contempt towards Hero cues an enraged Beatrice’s famous command “Kill Claudio”, which before long is followed by a particularly treasured entreaty. “Serve God, love me, and mend,“ Benedick tells Beatrice, the couple’s verbal persiflage newly cast aside in favour of direct address. Nwosu caps that remark with a backward roll that quickly gives way to press-ups, as if he were surprised by a strength of feeling for Beatrice of which he hadn’t thought himself capable.

As befits its Sicilian setting, the summery design swathes the Globe’s decorative columns in white, and Jonathan McGuinness’s Leonato cuts a rather louche presence, at least at the start, as if readying himself for a party that, unbeknownst to anyone at that moment, will come to know its fair share of pain. (Hero, by way of example, ends up shoved into her own wedding cake.) The contemporary look of Sami Fendall's design wouldn't be out of place in Mamma Mia!, though that musical doesn't come with the animal headgear on astonishing parade here.

More physically imposing than most Benedicks, Nwosu lends both clarion delivery and athletic dexterity to a part that is largely performative – that’s to say, Benedick can promise to “live a bachelor” as much as he likes but the heart has dictates and demands of its own.

Nixon’s Beatrice doesn’t quite fill this tricky space with the same vocal command as her male counterpart, but she’s immensely truthful and winning throughout, not least in her glance skywards during Beatrice’s “there was a star danced” utterance – the alfresco setting used to best advantage.

Jamie Lloyd’s exuberant production of this same play last year (soon headed to Broadway) turned Much Ado into a riotous knees-up, and Walker here deploys her own cascades of confetti as if paying corresponding obeisance to the play's festive spirit. Unlike Lloyd’s production, Walker retains the characters of Dogberry and Verges, a potentially tiresome double act on this occasion made palatable by the reliable comic finesse of Richard Katz as Dogberry, whose fondness for mangling the word “gazpacho” suggests a fetish of sorts for soup.

The deft casting throughout extends to Geraldine Alexander’s gender-flipped Sister, surely this play’s equivalent to the moral probity of The Winter’s Tale’s Paulina. And the excellent Potter is a scene-stealing Don John, a brazen provocateur defined by “discontent” whose self-definition – “let me be that I am” – amounts to a candid admission of villainy here informed, perhaps, by homoerotic jealousy.

It’s in the spirit of the place that Don John’s malfeasance gets vociferously booed but no matter. All is put right in time for the sort of collectively joyful curtain call that defines the Globe at its very best, of which this Much Ado – opening just in time for the summer solstice – is a shining example.

Much Ado About Nothing is at Shakespeare's Globe to 24 October. Book Much Ado About Nothing tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: Much Ado About Nothing (Photos by Marc Brenner)