Much Ado About Nothing, Shakespeare's Globe

Everybody’s talking about Much Ado About Nothing. At dinner tables, the pub and on the Bakerloo Line the only cultural conversation to be overheard having is whether David Tennant and Catherine Tate will be as wonderful as we all want them to be as Shakespeare’s feuding lovers Beatrice and Benedick. Their West End show opens next week, and among all the hype and headlines another production (and it was always going to be the “other production”) has quietly opened down at Bankside – a show with such warmth and knockabout energy that if Tate and Tennant are not very brilliant indeed they may find themselves outpaced.

A Sicilian summer complete with fruit-filled orange trees and ornamental ponds greets you as you enter the Globe for Much Ado About Nothing, and even the lingering pools of rainwater and nasty little wind of opening night couldn’t overpower the cheer of the greens and oranges against the latticed backdrop of the stage. It’s a sunny welcome whose tone persists throughout the evening, even among the accusations and confrontations of Act IV.

If anyone had been looking to director Jeremy Herrin, currently associate director at The Royal Court, to bring out the violence and tension Neil Rhodes’s programme essay highlighted so particularly in the play, then they would have been disappointed. His is as uncomplicated a comedic reading as it would be possible to find, and the first in my experience to draw a full-crowd laugh (rather than an awkward one) for “Kill Claudio”. The influence of his work in contemporary theatre is felt instead in the pace and delivery, with Eve Best’s Beatrice in particular a heroine who may be clad in ample skirts but whose performance strides comfortably about in jeans.

Fresh from her role in the American television comedy-drama Nurse Jackie as well as a turn as Wallis Simpson in The King’s Speech, Best’s homecoming to the London stage is a thing to be noisily celebrated. Returning to the role in which she made her professional theatrical debut some 20 years ago, Best was always going to make an interesting Beatrice, but in performance proves herself even more tomboyishly loveable than could possibly be hoped. As well as some delicious unscripted comedy (of the type the Globe does so well) and her physical dominance, it is she who brings some of the only moments of stillness to an ever-active stage, her “He lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it” hushing the groundlings with its smiling sadness.

The showier of the two performances, if less demanding, is Charles Edwards’s (pictured above) crowd-beloved Benedick. Choking on the word “husband” and requiring several run-ups at each utterance of “marriage” or “love”, he spars naturally with Best, bringing both the roguish man of the world and ill-adapted lover to his wooing. His delicately inflected comedy finds its rival in the broad – and unusually bearable – clowning of Dogberry and Verges (Paul Hunter and Adrian Hood), who have the signature jokes and cruelly comic relationship of a double act of many years’ standing.

Solid support comes in the form of John Stahl’s Antonio (whose confrontation scene with the Duke is fierce and heartfelt) and Matthew Pidgeon’s rather abridged “plain-dealing villain” Don John. Only in the partnership of Hero and Claudio (Ony Uhiara, pictured above and Philip Cumbus) does conviction and energy falter, with the price of an unusually comedic and artificial proposal scene being paid in the rather stiff reconciliation of the end.

If we lose the darker moments of the comedy in Herrin’s hands – the conflict between Claudio and Hero finds itself resolved with a laugh and a party game; Don John and his motiveless malignancy is edited down to a plot device – we gain a balmy comedy that will join Dromgoole’s Love’s Labours Lost and Thea Sharrock’s As You Like It in the Globe’s stable of summer favourites. A “merry war” has truly been declared, and we must wait until next week to see if Josie Rourke and her cast up at Wyndham’s can parry the accomplished quips of Best and Edwards.