Sean Holmes’s sunkissed production of Shakespeare’s comedy has arch, spirited performances from Amalia Vitale and Ekow Quartey as its central, wittily unwilling lovers, and a colour palette evoking blue Italian skies and ripe Seville oranges. The stylised trees on which these lustrous fruits hang conceal spikes, much like the plot.
Beneath the banter and the highly efficient physical comedy, Holmes shows how things work in 16th century Messina. When a group of aristocratic soldiers land on his doorstep, returning from the wars, governor Leonato is disappointed that his daughter Hero has only snagged young count Claudio, rather than the raffish prince, Don Pedro.
Reputation and inheritance are everything: so the decision of Hero’s cousin Beatrice and soldier Benedick to banter on equal terms and eschew marriage looks revolutionary. Their rancorous bond proves more durable than Claudio’s passion, easily derailed by Pedro’s illegitimate, disenfranchised (and extremely camp) brother John. It’s still a comedy, often a raucous one, but it has hard bones.
Vitale and Quartey make a fine double act. She’s slight, acid and droll. He’s big and ebullient but easily aggrieved. There’s a performative element to their careless independence, manifested in the relationship each of them builds with the audience of groundlings in the Globe’s pit: she gives thank-you kisses to women who help her onstage. He enlists a group at the front to swear and then promptly unswear a romantic vow.
Both are immensely likeable. The thorny scene where they finally admit their love, just as she asks him to kill his best friend, is deftly done. There’s nice work too from Adam Wadsworth as a juvenile, stroppy Claudio whose gullibility is partly down to his inexperience.
Lydia Fleming’s Hero is sweet but insipid, but the part requires little else. Holmes has servant Margaret (Lydia Fleming), the unwitting cause of Hero’s rejection, often hovering guiltily in the background.
The real surprise, though, is the way John Lightbody hustles Leonato into the foreground, as a roguishly charming host and then a devastated patriarch. He, too, gets the audience eating out of his hand, leading them in a “hey nonny nonny” singalong during which Quartey’s eye-rolling Benedick stuffs orange peel in his ears.
In the clown part of constable Dogberry, Jonnie Broadbent will remind older readers of Benny Hill, and suffers by comparison with the instinctually funny George Fouracres in Lucy Bailey’s production of Much Ado at the Globe in 2022. There was a revival at the National in June that year, too. Much Ado seems to have taken over from Midsummer Night’s Dream as the premature harbinger of sunny London weather.
Light drizzle duly greeted Holmes’s production last night, but barely dampened his finely crafted, joyful, intelligent exploration of a play where everything goes wrong until it suddenly goes right. Maybe Much Ado is catching a mood.
