Putting the ‘Rad’ in Traditional: Jamie Lloyd’s Production of ‘Much Ado About Nothing’
By Alice Kemp
When I entered the Theatre Royal Drury Lane on 13th February this year, the day before Valentine’s Day, my friend and I were greeted with pink and blue laser lights, blaring disco music, and dancing ushers. This was hardly the introduction to a Shakespearean comedy that I had expected. The play began with an upbeat serenade by the frivolous Margaret (Mason Alexander Park), and the audience was presented with a stage coated in baby pink blossom, which was kicked up, danced upon, and drifting down throughout the performance.
‘Much Ado About Nothing’ is set in Messina, Italy, and follows two couples in Shakespeare’s classic farce of trickery and mistaken identity. Although Hero and Claudio are normally the central lovers of this play, Jamie Lloyd’s production focuses more on the “sparring” Beatrice and Benedick, a bickering spinster and bachelor played by the well-known Marvel actors Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston. At the opening, Hero’s father Leonato invites his friends Don Pedro, Claudio, and Benedick to his home in Messina when they return from war. Claudio immediately falls in love with Hero and they get engaged at the masked ball, whilst Beatrice and Benedick launch into a “merry war” of debates and derisions. The subplot involving Dogberry, the foolish constable, has been removed to streamline the story, and the two halves of the performance are speared apart by Hero and Claudio’s disastrous wedding.
Much like Shakespeare’s other romantic comedies, including ‘Twelfth Night’ and ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’, both couples become the objects of mischievous pranks designed to wreak havoc on the party. Don Pedro’s brother, Don John, plots to deceive Claudio about Hero’s virtue, whilst the others trick Beatrice and Benedick into overhearing one another profess their feelings, which makes them realise that they do in fact love each other. When Claudio wrongly believes that Hero has been unfaithful, he denounces her at the altar, and she apparently dies from shock. However, Don John’s plan is unveiled, and an aggrieved Claudio agrees to accept the hand of Leonato’s ‘niece’; he is delighted when a living Hero appears, and both couples are united at the close.
Undeniably, Shakespeare has long been engrained in the traditional English canon. Although the playwright is known for changing theatrical conditions, such as allowing actors at the Globe Theatre to share in its profits, his work has inspired many literary traditions which have been passed down through centuries, including annual performances, festivals, and popular culture. These customs have been capitalised on by the advertisement of this production: “it may be 400 years old, but audiences’ love for the classic comedy is still as strong as ever”. In my view, Lloyd’s interpretation has contemporised a beloved play in a way that refuses to derive from its fundamentals, and its popularity—no doubt enhanced by the libertine Tom Hiddleston as Benedick—has exacerbated the long-standing importance of oral tradition to elicit joy.
My impression of Lloyd’s playful and lurid pink setting was that of love made manifest, with delicate, drifting confetti and a flamboyant, inflatable heart at the centre of the stage. The characters interact with and use these props to their advantage—in one particularly comical moment, Benedick hides in the bottom of the ballooned heart, and later causes the audience to erupt into laughter when Don Pedro, noticing that Benedick has covered himself with blossom on the floor, states wryly: “Benedick hath hid himself”. Music and dance are also at the forefront of this production, with several synchronised group numbers to funky 90s hits. The masked ball, for example, is a hypnotic party at a nightclub in which the characters dance around wearing giant animal heads as their disguises, and Claudio’s booze-induced bachelor night is rife with disco music and beer pong.
However, while Annabel Sampson indicates in her Tatler review that the characters “submit to the joyful, carnival-esque cringe of it all”, I think there is something wanting in the physical space behind the madness. Apart from the pink details, the stage seems quite bare, with a cavernous hole behind the heart that leads to the very back of the building. Additionally, the characters sit silently on chairs when they are not involved in the dialogue, which conjures a sense of being part of something and yet being separated from it at the same time. This perhaps encapsulates what it feels like to be in love in the modern day; the devotion and passion is displayed in the pink and stereotypically romantic elements, but there is a simultaneous emptiness in the visible space and a feeling of disconnect between the characters. On the one hand, this could be a nod to the loneliness that often accompanies social media, as Hero is seen regularly on her phone, or this could point to the isolation that Benedick and Beatrice truly feel when they jest about staying single forever.
This production was one of hilarious comedic effect, with the audience laughing, whistling, and calling out to the characters, most notably in response to Tom Hiddleston’s cheeky smiles and uncouth dance moves. His and Hayley Atwell’s wit and sarcasm were conveyed in electric exchanges that prompted the audience to root for their ‘enemies to lovers’ storyline, which is somewhat reflective of Netflix’s Bridgerton. I thoroughly enjoyed the modifications that Lloyd had made in order to direct the play’s attention to Beatrice and Benedick, and the contemporary inclinations that rendered their performances all the more relatable in 2025.