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Sometimes star casting absolutely works. Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell create a potent, antagonistic sense of attraction between Shakespeare’s warring lovers, Benedick and Beatrice, in this joyful, rave-influenced production by Jamie Lloyd. There’s lots of ecstatic dancing and singalongs to 90s club classics, but also a very clear expression of how a fripperous romantic comedy almost tips into tragedy.
It’s a triumphant return to form for Lloyd that redeems the two-play Shakespeare season he cheekily sandwiched into Drury Lane between two musicals, following his inert Tempest with Sigourney Weaver. This Much Ado is bold and brash with some coarse touches, but it feels like an event with a big ‘E’.
For days social media has been flooded with images of the cast in Studio 54 gear, having it large to David Guetta in a waterfall of pink confetti at the curtain call. It’s still a striking image when the curtain rises on this huge, empty stage covered in blushing drifts. The set consists of school chairs (as in Lloyd’s revelatory Seagull), later augmented by a table and a giant, rose-coloured, inflatable heart upstage.
Hiddleston and Atwell regularly break the fourth wall, flirting and riffing on their celebrity with the audience: one misfire is the introduction of life-size cutouts of their Marvel Cinematic Universe characters to the otherwise blissfully absurd scenes where their characters are tricked into loving each other. The simplicity of the staging and the licensed showboating of the stars gives an idea of what theatre in Shakespeare’s day might have been like, only with more Jagerbombs, airhorn blasts and disco lights.
The most vocal audience members are the Hiddleston fans – Hiddlestans? – particularly when he unbuttons his silky shirt to reveal abs on which you could grate nutmegs. He’s very funny as the vain hero, with a winking swagger for the audience and a series of fuming double-takes for Atwell’s Beatrice when she regularly wrong-foots him. He’s not afraid to look absurd, at one point inserting himself into the aforementioned balloon heart, which makes him look like he’s wearing a huge pair of comedy breasts on his head. He also speaks the verse beautifully, albeit adopting a knowingly husky sex-voice in later scenes.
Atwell is simply magnificent, a beady tigress with quicksilver intelligence and manicured gold claws. At first I feared her glittery-jumpsuited Beatrice would be too venomous, her lines dripping with naked contempt. But she settles quickly and luxuriantly into the language and the physical abandon of the dancing. I’ve never heard Beatrice’s waspish banter better delivered – it makes you wish Atwell did more comedy – nor felt her rage so powerfully. When she falls for Benedick, a glance at him seems to scald her.
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Much of the ensemble from Lloyd’s Tempest fills out the rest of the cast. James Phoon’s Claudio is a silver-trousered himbo who falls for Mara Huf’s Insta-influencer Hero when she twerks against him. Their dimness and the ease with which they’re parted counterpoint the difficulty that smartarse B&B have in coming together.
Gerald Kyd’s prince is a louche sybarite in wafty fuchsia duds, his evil brother John (Tim Steed) a languidly camp misanthrope who utters a little “mwah-ha-hah” when contemplating villainy. Forbes Masson is unsubtle as Hero’s father Leonato, but Mason Alexander Park is drily hilarious as her “gentle friend” Margaret. Park also covers the absence of the comic constables, judiciously axed by Lloyd, and supplies vocals for several anthems, including Guetta’s closing, arms-aloft When Love Takes Over.
The rain of flamingo confetti, the sexually androgynous and brightly-coloured costumes, the charisma and chemistry of two good-looking stars, the air of hedonism and the drama of the big, bare stage… this is altogether gorgeous.
Much Ado About Nothing at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, to 5 April.
