MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING at the Roman Theatre 2023 . Photo: Richard Budd

Yet another sparky, innovative take on Much Ado About Nothing of which there’s a lot about this summer although I sometimes wonder whether it’s a competition to see who can come up with the quirkiest re-imagining. The National Youth Theatre, for example, set theirs on Love Island earlier this year.

Creation Theatre has teamed up with OVO for this 1980s version of a play which sits neatly in the leafy, hilly space of the Roman Theatre on a summer evening especially when we’re graced with kind weather.  And they’ve certainly recruited a talented cast, all of whom have to work pretty hard, because there are only six of them.

Good ideas include the rebirth of Leanto’s brother as his sister Antonia, good fun with a long 1980s coiled phone cord and lots of Keystone Cops-style comedy with Verges and Dogberry with sirens and loud hailers around the audience.  I was less happy about the Friar as Elvis although it’s very funny. Presley died in 1977 but perhaps we’re supposed to assume that this Friar is a self-styled, enthusiastic Elvis imitator/fan.

Anna Tolputt – a charismatically diminutive woman and a fine actor – plays Benedick as a man. She is very watchable but as we see Beatrice (Emily Woodward – excellent) gradually realise that she loves him, it feels as if we’re somewhere between a “trouser role” like Cherubino in The Marriage of Figaro and a school play in a girl’s school. Tolputt has, however, an excellent knack of communicating her feelings with her face and hiding her character’s gentle vulnerability and innate decency behind gruffness as every good Benedick does. She has a gift for comedy too. Few people could get a laugh out of simply dropping an alka-seltzer into a glass of water.

Lewis Chandler is outstanding as Don Pedro – all independent school RP – along with a delightfully camp Margaret, the hilarious Elvis character and the self-important Dogberry. He is clearly a highly accomplished actor having a lot of fun. Brianna Douglas, meanwhile competently  gives us a prettily virginal Hero, an excitable Verges and a bent, tiresome, bossy old lady when she’s playing Antonia.

I also enjoyed Nicholas Osmond’s performance as the plummy- vowelled, malevolent Don John and as Leonato, a laid back father until we get that profoundly disturbing patriarchal anger with Hero after she’s jilted at the altar. He handles the change with so much conviction that it’s painful. Herb Cuanalo, who also plays Claudio, is at this best as the track-suited, East End Borachio earning pocket money by making mischief at Don John’s behest.

The problem with all that doubling, however is that there often has to be contrived stage business to allow other actors to change costumes and at one point there’s a gap where nothing happens at all and that feels clumsily amateurish as does using recorded music to cover scene changes.  But the occasional use of a recorded or telephone conversation as a way of not having a character on stage at a given moment is both ingenious and effective.

I liked the slight hint at the play on the word “die” by the way. It was Elizabethan slang for orgasm but I may have been the only person in the audience who got the joke.

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  ‘MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING’ at the Roman Theatre 2023. Photos: Richard Budd

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• First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/much-ado-about-nothing-14/