UTS Rating: 🎭🎭🎭🎭

There can surely be few better places to see Shakespeare than Shakespeare’s Globe, particularly when a production embraces everything this extraordinary space can offer. Chelsea Walker’s Much Ado About Nothing does exactly this: it is bright, playful, physical and gloriously aware of its audience, while still allowing the darkness beneath Shakespeare’s comedy to creep in when it needs to.

Sami Fendall’s clean white set and contemporary costumes immediately establish a world of money, leisure and rather too much time on its inhabitants’ hands. Linen suits and sparkles abound, while the masked ball becomes a parade of extraordinary animal heads, simultaneously ridiculous and faintly sinister. Joseph Potter’s Don John sporting a snake feels especially apt.

But the heart of Much Ado is always Beatrice and Benedick, and Pippa Nixon and Ken Nwosu establish their sparring relationship almost instantly. Their exchanges fizz, but it is Nwosu in particular who proves irresistible. His Benedick seems to regard the Globe audience as several hundred additional scene partners, constantly addressing it, reacting to it and even interacting with the musicians.

That relationship pays off spectacularly during the eavesdropping scenes. Benedick’s attempts to conceal himself while his friends knowingly manipulate him develop into an elaborate piece of physical theatre involving stairs, boards, flowers, water and increasingly desperate attempts not to be discovered. Nwosu’s comic timing is superb. When Beatrice subsequently finds herself subjected to much the same treatment, the production cleverly mirrors the earlier sequence, right down to the soaking.

There is something deliciously silly about watching two intelligent people being so comprehensively manipulated into admitting what everybody else can already see.

Walker surrounds them with a strong company. Marlowe Chan-Reeves is particularly enjoyable as Borachio, making the troublemaker funny, sly and enormously watchable even as his actions propel the play towards its darkest episode. Richard Katz’s Dogberry, meanwhile, heads up a wonderfully comic security-guard-style Watch.

The live music is another pleasure. Angus MacRae’s score threads through the action rather than simply decorating it, performed by musicians including cellists Maddie Cutter, Zosia Jagodzinska and Richard Phillips, guitarist Charlie Laffer and music director/percussionist Zands Duggan. A beautiful cello trio in the second half is a particular highlight.

And then the sunshine disappears.

The public humiliation of Assa Kanouté’s Hero at her wedding remains an extraordinarily brutal gear change, particularly after so much exuberant comedy. The production doesn’t shy away from it. The subsequent funeral procession, with the bright white world replaced by black figures and shadows, is simple and extremely effective.

It also makes Beatrice’s famous instruction to Benedick, “Kill Claudio!!” land with tremendous force. On this particular night it was greeted by a huge cheer from the Globe audience. Joshua John’s Claudio may be painfully easy to manipulate, but by this stage the audience’s sympathies are emphatically elsewhere.

Of course, this is Shakespearean comedy, so death gives way to revelation, reconciliation, marriage and, naturally, the now almost customary slightly bonkers Globe dance to send everyone home smiling.

This is a Much Ado that understands that Shakespeare doesn’t need to be treated reverentially to be taken seriously. It is funny, accessible and exuberantly theatrical, making tremendous use of the Globe’s unique relationship between actor and audience, but finding space for genuine darkness within all the fun.

And in Ken Nwosu’s endlessly inventive Benedick, it has a comic performance worth the ticket price alone.

Much Ado indeed. And very much enjoyed.

🎭 Much Ado About Nothing
📍 Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until Saturday 24th October, with tickets available here: Much Ado About Nothing | Summer 2026 | What’s On