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Much Ado About Nothing, theatre review: Fiercely populist take is a feast for the eyes

Colourful: The cast of Much Ado About Nothing: Tristram Kenton
Colourful: The cast of Much Ado About Nothing: Tristram Kenton

Of all Shakespeare plays, Much Ado lends itself most easily to sun-drenched transposition. Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson running riot in Tuscany in the ever-delightful 1993 film is a prime example and now director Matthew Dunster shifts those reluctant lovers Beatrice and Benedick to revolution-era Mexico in 1910. Whatever else one might say about it, the production is rich in colour and detail and looks – and sounds - exquisite.

Anna Fleischle’s design is a continual feast for the eye with its shrines, painted tiles and array of bright costumes. Sicily has become Monterrey, but the motivation behind these changes is, as Dunster admits in the programme, primarily aesthetic. Yet as ever soldiers are returning from a war and love is in the air for two couples.

The repartee between Beatrice (Beatriz Romilly) and Benedick (Matthew Needham, appealing) is the most sparkling in Shakespeare but unfortunately it lands rather heavily here, primarily due to over-emphatic work from the otherwise likeable Romilly, which skews the delicacy of the scenes. Elsewhere, the dancing rhythms of the nimble lines are too often obscured by some lumpen verse-speaking.

Like Emma Rice’s current version of Twelfth Night, this is another fiercely populist take on the classical canon and there is much to be said for this wider perspective, which will undoubtedly appeal to a fresh audience drawn by the lack of formality.

Nonetheless some of Dunster’s twiddling diminishes textual clarity rather than enhances it. The unendingly tedious constable Dogberry has been transformed, for no easily apparent reason, into the unendingly tedious American silent film director Dog Berry (Ewan Wardrop). These scenes, as ever, are purgatorial and the treatment of poor slandered Hero (Anya Chalotra) still as jarring and bitter.

In rep until Oct 15, Shakespeare's Globe; shakespearesglobe.com