An exuberant Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe — review

Things are getting fruity on the UK stage this spring. Apples, mangoes and bananas play a succulently suggestive role in the RSC’s joyous new production of The Buddha of Suburbia and at Shakespeare’s Globe it’s the turn of oranges to get in on the romance.

Piles of the fruit adorn the stage for Sean Holmes’s sunny new staging of Much Ado About Nothing, which kicks off the Globe’s outdoor summer season in splendid style. Espaliered orange trees clamber up the walls of Grace Smart’s set; Ekow Quartey’s Benedick stuffs peel into his ears to drown out the lilt of a love song; and we first meet Amalia Vitale’s funny, feisty little Beatrice as she skewers a juicy orb on the point of a sharp peeling knife. Which just about sums up her character’s attitude to marriage.

Oranges can be sweet but also pithy and full of pips — rather like the narrative of Shakespeare’s play. This is a drama riddled with inversions: Beatrice and Benedick, who bicker constantly, really love one another; Hero and Claudio, who fall headlong in love, have a horrible rift; truth and duplicity twine around one another like vines throughout. It’s a comedy, too, that contains some real nastiness and the seeds of potential tragedy: in Claudio’s sudden and dreadful accusations of infidelity we see echoes of Othello and The Winter’s Tale.

Holmes could find more jeopardy in all this and he doesn’t bring the depths of political and psychological grounding to the plot that Lucy Bailey did in her 2022 staging, which, set in 1940s Italy, made great sense of the machismo, misogyny and gulf of understanding between the sexes. Even so, his period production, while mightily enjoyable and fizzing with comic élan, finds many freshly revealing moments, demonstrating that this Messina may be sun-kissed, but it’s also a sexist, snobbish place.

There’s an illuminating pause from John Lightbody as Hero’s father, Leonato, for instance, when he realises that the prince is wooing his daughter for Claudio (a lesser match). And Quartey’s excellent Benedick traces with great clarity and authenticity his journey from macho banter with the lads to a sharp realisation of the damage men can do. He and Vitale have a wonderful rapport, with one another and with the audience, and both convey a sense of the emotional bruising that might underpin their characters’ performative cynicism.

Jonnie Broadbent is very droll as the officious little constable Dogberry, who accidentally reveals the malevolent hoax that hoodwinked Claudio, and the roving band of musicians add to the genial air of mischief. It could be tarter, then, but this exuberant ensemble production slips down as pleasantly as a glass of freshly squeezed orange juice.

★★★★☆

To August 24, shakespearesglobe.com