A drawback to our national addiction to Shakespeare is that occasionally a production comes along that’s so good it sort of queers the pitch for a while. I’m not saying Jamie Lloyd’s superlative 2025 Much Ado About Nothing was the last word on the play, or that Chelsea Walker’s new Globe production is intentionally derivative of it. Nonetheless, as a largely upbeat, good vibes, modern dress production in which the cast cavort around in amusing animal masks, it does kind of invite comparisons in which it comes out second best, albeit not heinously so.
Crucially it has a great Benedick and Beatrice, the bickering will-they-won’t-they frenemies whose chemistry forms the beating heart of the play. Ken Nwosu is an affable prankster of a Benedick, with a laidback energy – he’s altogether less martial than his soldier pals – and a tendency for silly jokes (he disrupts the wedding scene by making a stupid noise then blaming an audience member). Pippa Nixon is a genuine delight as a bonkers free-spirit Beatrice, who within her first minutes on stage has howled like a wolf at the sky and performatively snogged the nameless messenger who announces the main male characters are coming back from war.
Nwosu and Nixon are both very good, but I think crucially they’re quite different to each other. For once you sense that the reason that Beatrice and Benedick weren’t a couple from the beginning is not simply because they’re both incorrigible banter machines, but because they genuinely can’t quite see themselves with each other.
They’re also both very funny – the sequence where they’re eavesdropping on their friends is immaculate, and involves both of them getting soaked, and I’ve never seen anyone wring a laugh out of Beatrice asking Benedick to kill his pal Claudio like Nixon does.
The masks and animal costumes are a lot of fun too, even if the fact Lloyd did the same thing last year takes the shine off a little.
It’s the more serious bits where it struggles. Walker goes all in on stressing how problematic Claudio (Joshua John) dumping Hero (Assa Kanoute) is. But if you push so far that Claudio just looks like an incel douchebag with rage issues then it’s hard to really feel the ending works.
Walker has also included the oft-trimmed plot tracing goofy policeman Dogberry’s investigation into the events that lead to Hero being falsely accused of infidelity. Richard Katz is fun as the wild-eyed, wild-haired Dogberry, but as much as anything else the inclusion of the sequence means there’s a chunk of the second half where Nwosu and Nixon are nowhere to be seen, and the show suffers because of it.
If you saw the Lloyd version I’d say it should be down to your personal tolerance if you’re ready for another Much Ado in a similar vein, But it’s a very enjoyable, upbeat production from a gifted young director, that pulls off the balancing act of appealing to the Globe’s tourist multitudes while also having leads with enough va va voom to impress Shakespeare aficionados.
