23 April 2025
If Jamie Lloyd’s sublime Much Ado About Nothing with a pink-hued 80s clubbing party vibe was worthy of the Premier League then I’m afraid the RSC’s football-themed production, that opened last night in Stratford, is a distinctly second division affair.
Much Ado is my favourite Shakespeare comedy and it’s pretty indistructible. But a setting more akin to Footballer’s Wives was not on my bingo cards for 2025.
Things look promising from the minute we enter the auditorium with the pre-set playing out on massive TV screens that dominate and wrap the auditorium. The set is the players’ tunnel swinging into a team dressing room of a football stadium complete with a plunge pool (that will later prove problematic elsewhere in the play). So instead of returning victorious from war, Don Pedro and his strapping men are instead the laddish Messina FC, and they burst onto the stage at full volume after thrashing Madrid FC 3-2 with Claudio the Man of the Match, scoring a last minute goal to seal a hat trick victory. Cue lots of macho posturing, victory celebrations, cigars, vapes, WAGS, prosecco, and Beatrice as a TV football reporter complete with camera crew earpiece and microphone. The fast-paced madness of this scene, with director Michael Longhurst shoe horning in lots of topical football references, is the first indication that all will not be well with the evening. Shouted out loud and rapidly in the excitement of the moment, the beauty of Shakespeare’s language gets mangled and distorted. Whole passages are lost. And who exactly are these characters? They are dressed as WAGS and players, reporters and ground staff, but they have no individuality.
The show is quite a sleazy affair with revenge porn, slut shaming via text and a cigar-chomping lecherous football manager getting a blow job under his camel coat while on the phone to his wife. Nice. The parents sitting near me with a 12-year-old boy watching really appreciated that moment.
The central love-battle between Beatrice (Freema Agyeman) and Benedick (Nick Blood) – here with the emphasis on the dick – is a rather tepid affair. He’s one of the Messina soccer team, an estuary sounding dullard, and gets to spend quite a bit of the play stripped to a towel (or less) battling to hide in the jacuzzi or under a massage table. She is imperious in the extreme. They never really convince when they are tricked to be loved up with each other.
The football setting is largely forgotten as the play progresses – if only the same could have been said for the painfully unfunny Dogberry scenes that Jamie Lloyd thankfully excised in the West End. Here Dogberry and the men of the Watch are security guards in high vis jackets. The scenes prove to be as painful as a mid match goolie-grab by Gazza.
The set proves cumbersome with lots of chairs, sofas and sun loungers being carried on and off, and a fountain added to the jacuzzi at one point. The trouble with having a source of water centre stage is obvious – lots of mopping needed and at one point Agyeman ended up with a rather distracting large wet patch on her dress after sitting beside it.
Jamie Lloyd’s production delivered a much needed burst of colour and vibrancy to the West End and you floated out of the Theatre Royal Drury Lane with a feeling of pure joy. I left the RSC theatre feeling sad and deflated, just as millions of soccer fans do every Saturday when their beloved team under performs on the pitch. A joyless fixture from kick off to closing whistle.
