“A summer’s night, attentive groundlings, gales of laughter: when the Globe is in its element, there’s no more magical spot,” said Dominic Cavendish in The Telegraph. “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” kicked off the summer season in April, in an enjoyable (if frenetic) staging which will play in rep until late August.
Now it’s joined by a “Much Ado” that is “one of the most charming accounts” of the play in years.
It’s a giddy, light-filled production of Shakespeare’s “romcom”, said Matt Wolf on London Theatre. Director Chelsea Walker brings “wit, incisiveness and vigour to a play shot through with those very qualities”, plus “a generous dollop of heart”.
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“Much Ado” is “rightly celebrated as a showcase for one of theatre’s most-cherished sparring partnerships”, said Donald Hutera in The Times. Here the “skirmish of wit” between the “tart-tongued proto-feminist” Beatrice, played with “mischievous vivacity” by Pippa Nixon, and Ken Nwosu’s “equally marriage-wary” Benedick is a pleasure to behold. “This pair of frenemies function like opposing magnets whose push-me-pull-you attraction, outrageously exploited and manipulated by those around them, grounds the play in rollicking and sarcastic humour.”
Yet lurking beneath the frivolous “discourse on the vagaries of love” in “Much Ado” “are darker forms of pretence and deceit”. I’d say that the production has the balance between them “just about” right.
I felt that the evening could have leaned more deeply into the play’s problematic elements, said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. For instance, the scene in which Beatrice’s young cousin Hero (Assa Kanouté) is humiliated at her own wedding to Claudio contains a powerful moment – but it “does not fully swivel”, as it should, “into stark, potentially tragic territory”.
Still, in its charms the production delights. Elegant and effervescent, it has a “universally adept” cast, and “simply gorgeous” costumes, dance and music (courtesy of a live band). It is “insuppressibly crowd-pleasing, eminently worth seeing”, and surely destined to be a “summer blockbuster”.
Globe Theatre, London SE1. Until 24 October
