Last Updated on June 20, 2026
A Menagerie of Mischief in this high-energy new production
4.5 out of 5.0 starsDirected by Chelsea Walker, last night’s Much Ado About Nothing sets the Bard’s timeless work in a contemporary world. Remarkably, despite being more than four centuries old, the play’s concerns with status, reputation and public performance feel entirely contemporary. Status, desire and romance are seasoned with image, gossip and social performance, all wrapped in a fast-moving romantic comedy. Contemporisation doesn’t always work, but here it seemed flawless.
Part of the success of this Much Ado, of course, is down to an exemplary cast, led by Pippa Nixon as Beatrice and Ken Nwosu as Benedick. Nixon’s Beatrice is effervescent.
“I had rather hear my dog bark at a crow than a man swear he loves me,” she famously declares in Act One.
Of course, we know things will change, but not before Nixon has made a deliciously exaggerated show of rejecting marriage and mocking the expectations placed upon women in society. She’s an intelligent Beatrice, not willing to compromise, yet with an underlying frustration at the limitations imposed upon her.
The returning soldier Benedick may have been a success on the battlefield, but finding a suitable partner seems more elusive. When Beatrice announces that she will not marry until a hot January, he retorts:
“God keep your ladyship still in that mind! so some gentleman or other shall ‘scape a predestinate scratched face.”
Nwosu’s Benedick is endearing and frequently hilarious. There are very few occasions when I would swap a seat for a place amongst the groundlings at the Globe, but Walker’s production of Much Ado About Nothing makes a compelling case. Nwosu repeatedly draws the audience into the action, addressing lines directly to individuals and even using the crowd as cover from his friends. The result is spontaneous and deeply funny, a reminder of how effectively Shakespeare’s comedies work when performers embrace the unique relationship between stage and audience. It is all good-humoured entertainment, perfect for a balmy summer’s evening.
If Beatrice is full of acerbic wit, her cousin Hero (Assa Kanouté) is a gentler soul, content to follow her father’s wishes and marry Claudio. It’s a romance that develops with remarkable speed. Claudio (Joshua John) recalls that before the war, he looked upon Hero with a soldier’s eye; on his return, he sees her as a potential wife. Whether that transformation is driven entirely by love remains an open question. John’s Claudio is naïve, charming and sincere, making his later actions all the more painful. A suave Leonato (Jonathan McGuinness) is delighted when Don Pedro, played with easy authority by Adam Long, helps bring the young couple together.
Joseph Potter’s Don John provides the necessary darkness, his bitterness and malice standing in sharp contrast to the warmth and vitality of the surrounding cast. Together with Borachio (Marlowe Chan-Reeves), he engineers the deception that threatens to destroy Hero’s happiness. The plot itself is absurd, but Shakespeare’s comedy has never relied upon realism, and the production commits to the story with enough conviction that the emotional stakes remain real.
When Claudio publicly denounces Hero on their wedding day, the tone shifts dramatically. It takes the intervention of Sister Francis (Geraldine Alexander) to devise the deception that will ultimately expose the truth. The crisis also gives Beatrice one of her finest moments, demanding that Benedick prove his love by challenging Claudio to a duel.
As ever, it is left to the Watch to untangle the mess. Richard Katz’s Dogberry is gloriously self-important, his mangled language and comic incompetence providing some of the evening’s biggest laughs. What begins as comic relief becomes an accidental triumph, as the bumbling constable succeeds where his social superiors have failed.
This production of Much Ado About Nothing works on several levels. The cast is uniformly excellent, with not a single weak performance and some superb characterisation throughout. More importantly, Walker finds a way to make the story resonate with a modern audience without sacrificing its historical context. The elegant costumes create a world in which hierarchy and half-arranged marriages still feel plausible, while the animal masks worn at the masquerade are particularly effective. They conceal identity in the literal sense demanded by the plot, but also suggest the instinctive desires, rivalries, and insecurities that lurk beneath the polished surface of Messina’s social world. The masks reinforce one of the play’s central concerns: the tension between performance and authenticity.
For me, the weak spot was the music by Angus MacRae, directed by Zands Duggan, which added little and occasionally felt at odds with the production’s tone. That, however, is a minor blemish on an otherwise outstanding evening. Chelsea Walker’s Much Ado About Nothing succeeds because it trusts Shakespeare’s text while illuminating its enduring relevance, producing a comedy that feels both timeless and thoroughly contemporary.
The new Globe production of Much Ado About Nothing runs from 11 June 2026 to 24 October 2026 in the Globe Theatre.
21 New Globe Walk
Bankside
London SE1 9DT
Check our previews for more Bankside and South Bank theatre productions
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