The Globe so often comes under fire for tampering with tradition but here is Shakespeare’s play on love, deception, male singledom and female purity that should please the purists. Its comedy is delivered straight, as it were, complete with Elizabethan-era costumes that contain the production’s greatest wow factor.
The masked ball, in which the disguised Don Pedro (Ryan Donaldson) woos Hero (Lydia Fleming) on behalf of Claudio, is a wonder to behold. There are elaborate and exquisite animal-themed beaks, manes and feathers that looks like a ravishingly surreal 16th-century fantasy come to life.
But there is no whiff of stuffiness in Sean Holmes’s production, which feels light and modern despite the traditional carapace. There is Elizabethan dance too, which, with the costumes, brings period-era magic, although movement is less original outside the dance choreography.
War is over and a lovely warm summer euphoria emanates from the set, with Mediterranean orange trees climbing the back wall of Grace Smart’s stage design along with big scattered baskets of oranges that characters pick up, occasionally peel and eat.
There is entrancing music, too, with instruments that include a mandolin alongside guitar, accordion and percussion. This musicality is prominent in between scenes and adds a cheeky flourish to the comedy or action with arch sounds that inflate the moment (of tension, romance or intrigue) rather like a score accompanying a silent movie.
Both Amalia Vitale’s quick, witty, ardent Beatrice and Ekow Quartey’s loveably pompous Benedick are entertaining highlights as they exchange comic sallies. Although their bristling love/hate chemistry never quite fizzes, you feel the tenderness of their union at the end.
There is a more glaring lack of synergy between the central lovers, Hero and Claudio (Adam Wadsworth), whose romance feels indistinct. This takes the shock out of the Claudio’s rejection of Hero, so that the play’s uneasy blend of comedy and near-tragedy strikes an even greater dissonant note. There is not a significant enough drop in tone beyond the aborted wedding either so it continues to feel like a comedy with added shouting rather than anything more textured.
The comedy comes in primary colours, broadly played and verging on the spirit of clownish pantomime rather than delicately wrung from the dialogue – although the gulling scene, in which Benedick is fooled into his awkward romance with Beatrice, does not have as much ingenious physical comedy as it might, and is solid rather than surprising.
There are problems with pace too, and the comedy becomes tonally flat-footed in a second act that contains too much plot and not enough time even though the play is more than two-and-a-half-hours long. But the strained humour of Dogberry (Jonnie Broadbent) and his gang is thankfully brief and the production, as a whole, is exuberantly put together.
Ultimately, it is joyful summer fare with most of the darkness leached away – a problem play made frothy and fun.
At Shakespeare’s Globe theatre, London, 11 May-24 August
