Much Ado About Nothing review

The new season at Shakespeare’s Globe – its first at full capacity since before the pandemic – opens with Lucy Bailey’s comfortable and summery production of Much Ado About Nothing. It’s 1945, Italy, and a soldier, bloody from battle, clambers on to the stage to the strains of Italian partisan song Bella Ciao (a song that was also sung from Italian balconies during the first lockdown).

There’s a palpable air of celebration after trying times – the characters spend much of their time with glasses of fizz in their hands, engaged in an extended aperitivo hour or donning faintly pagan animal masks for a ball. Designer Joanna Parker has decked the Globe in ivy and a long tongue of green turf stretches into the yard. Katy Stephens, as a gender-swapped Leonata, indulges in a spot of opera while playing the hostess and opening up her home to Don Pedro’s men.

The wartime setting, at times, feels a bit like dressing, primarily an excuse to strew the stage with accordions and eye-pleasing gowns, but Bailey – director of the Globe’s famously bloody Titus Andronicus – has a strong understanding of the space and this is a production of clarity as well as charm. The focus is on romance, the mood upbeat; the overall effect elegant, if a little restrained.

The defiantly unhusbanded Beatrice (Lucy Phelps) and Benedick (Ralph Davis) spar nicely with one another. They are both as adept at physical silliness – hiding behind shrubs, having an unfortunate encounter with a garden hose – as at romantic jousting. Phelps, in particular, is good at switching registers: she’s strong and proud, but not incapable of melting. In terms of actual chemistry, though, Hero (Nadi Kemp-Sayfi) and Claudio (Patrick Osborne) have the edge.

The humour supplied by Dogberry (George Fouracres) and his Watch generates more chuckles than belly laughs. There’s a dash of Blackadder’s Captain Darling to his prim shrillness and the moment he almost pitches into the pit on his bicycle and then takes his frustration out on the audience is delightfully done. Philip Cumbus also, rather impressively, is a strong comic presence despite working script-in-hand as a late stand-in for Boracio. Stephens, always compelling, brings complexity to Leonata, outwardly generous, inwardly shrewd, with an edge of steel.

The overall breezy tone means that the sudden shifts into darkness feels more marked – Beatrice’s injunction to kill Claudio causes audible gasps and Leonata’s turn against her daughter feels particularly brutal. The fact that it’s her mother condemning Hero makes it all the more chilling. But this darkness is quickly banished – it is not this show’s main aim - in a production intent on spreading good cheer and warm feeling, a little sunshine after a hard winter.