It is usually a jukebox musical audience that are encouraged to “dance in the aisles”. In Jamie Lloyd’s 1990s clubland twist on Shakespeare, the ushers are doing it before the curtain has even gone up. It is a sign of things to come, along with the throwback soundtrack and the giddy swirl of disco lights.
Taylor Dayne’s Tell It to My Heart kicks off proceedings and a shower of pink confetti rains down. This is a thoroughly weird and absolutely wonderful re-conceptualisation, turning Shakespeare’s comedy, which narrowly swerves tragedy, into an old school house party cum modern romcom.
More musical than play, the interludes of song and dance are sometimes abrupt – from Beastie Boys to Deee-Lite and Backstreet Boys. The dated sound might be a nod to the play’s older couple, Beatrice and Benedick, played by Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston, who are veteran singletons before being tricked into admitting their love for each other.
Hiddleston and Atwell have a sparring chemistry that is as bright as the modern-day costumes (all pink spangles, gold shimmer and sequins). You can virtually see the sparks coming off them in their “merry war”, which is fuelled by antagonistic duelling but dips suddenly to earnestness and intensity.
Every other element works alongside them, with the drink (and drug?) addled hedonism on stage not compromising Shakespeare’s verse.
Most of the cast here worked on Lloyd’s previous West End show, The Tempest, including Mara Huf and James Phoon, who again play a couple in love as Hero and Claudio, along with a fey Tim Steed as Don John, and several others. That show met with mostly negative reviews. This seems like The Tempest’s revenge in its determined infectiousness – genuinely funny, romantic and trimmed of the laboured subplot involving tiresome Dogberry.
It has the same creative team too in set designer, Soutra Gilmour (bringing similarly dark depths around the stage), lighting by Jon Clark (disco lights galore) and sound by Ben and Max Ringham. Movement director, Fabian Aloise, creates lovably cheesy dance routines and the overall effect combines into hallucinatory revelry.
Mason Alexander Park, who stole the show as a lugubrious Ariel in The Tempest, plays Hero’s attendant, Margaret, but they are key to the soundtrack of the play with their gorgeous intermittent singing.
The masquerade ball features plushy headdresses (from Tweety Pie to a mini-octopus); they are silly and humorous but return through the production to look more disturbingly psychedelic – like an acid trip gone wrong.
The switch from light to dark, when Hero is falsely accused of unfaithfulness on her wedding day by Claudio, is orchestrated with a masterful precision of tone. It brings dangerous anger, and where the scene ordinarily shows up the play’s dated gender politics – a man questioning the virtue of a woman and condemning her to metaphoric death – Hero never loses her power and the couple’s reunion seems genuine and joyful.
The visible mechanics of the stage – from lights to bare back wall and a row of chairs for actors to sit when they are not performing – are customary features in Lloyd’s shows, but there is something magical in it here: they come downstage to perform not at us but to us, making eye contact, pointing at us individually as they speak of love and attraction.
There is a meta moment too, in Beatrice and Benedick’s romance when they meet cardboard cut-outs of each other’s Marvel superheroes (both have starred in the Hollywood franchise). Benedick worships at the cardboard altar of Atwell’s Captain Carter while Beatrice dances suggestively with Hiddleston’s Loki.
The latter is certainly god of mischief here, pulling off difficult physical comedy involving confetti in the eavesdropping scene when he is tricked into his romance, and pulling out some nifty dance moves (Atwell pulls out her own, too). Both wink and flirt with the audience without deviating from Shakespeare’s text “I am loved of all ladies,” says Hiddleston and the auditorium roars in confirmation.
Lloyd himself seems like the god of mischief in constructing this party of pink silliness. You would have to be a god of stone to not be seduced by its wacky winter joy. A wonderfully giddy thing indeed, and that is my conclusion.
• At Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London, until 5 April
