Much Ado About Nothing review: charm over darkness
Get the Culture newsletter
Daily culture — film, music, books, the trends and ideas worth your attention. Free.
- Chelsea Walker directs a new staging of Shakespeare's 'Much Ado About Nothing' built on romcom energy, with Pippa Nixon as Beatrice and Ken Nwosu as Benedick driving the central flirtation through linguistic sparring
- Pippa Nixon plays Beatrice as 'tartly outraged' yet physically playful, while Ken Nwosu softens Benedick with arch comic timing — but the reviewer finds their hostilities lack 'sting and tension'
- Richard Katz draws 'vigorous clowning' from Dogberry and his watchmen, scenes the reviewer notes have 'in other hands, sunk the pace of this play'
- The production features animal masks in Act Two reminiscent of Jamie Lloyd's West End staging, with Hero (Assa Kanouté) holding a sheep's head evoking a lamb to slaughter and Beatrice donning an eagle's head — a visual motif the reviewer says 'dissipates in the face of so much fun and froth'
- Two sudden kisses — between Don John (Joseph Potter) and Borachio (Marlowe Chan-Reeves), and between Beatrice and a messenger — hint at sexual attraction but feel 'random — an unsustained idea,' according to the review
- The aborted wedding scene includes a moment of physical humiliation involving a multi-tiered wedding cake, but the review argues the production 'does not fully swivel into stark, potentially tragic territory' and resolves 'too trippingly'
- The staging leans on a warm palette of pinks, light greys and lemons in costume, an excellent live band, and dance numbers, earning the verdict 'insuppressibly crowd-pleasing, eminently worth seeing'
Why it matters: Walker's reading shows how a director can preserve Shakespeare's comedic high notes while sidestepping the false-accusation plot that resonates with modern reckonings on sexual smearing. The animal-mask visual echoes of Jamie Lloyd's West End production suggest a shared directorial vocabulary now migrating into regional Shakespeare staging. For theatergoers, the trade-off is clear: a charming, accessible evening that asks less of the source material than it could.
