Much Ado About Nothing at Shakespeare’s Globe 2024 – Reviews Round-up

"New London staging finds revealing truths amid fizzing comedy"

"Holmes could find more jeopardy in all this and he doesn’t bring the depths of political and psychological grounding to the plot that Lucy Bailey did in her 2022 staging, which, set in 1940s Italy, made great sense of the machismo, misogyny and gulf of understanding between the sexes. Even so, his period production, while mightily enjoyable and fizzing with comic élan, finds many freshly revealing moments, demonstrating that this Messina may be sun-kissed, but it’s also a sexist, snobbish place."

"This sunkissed production is joyful and intelligent"

"Amalia Vitale and Ekow Quartey are arch and spirited as the central, wittily unwilling lovers"

"Sean Holmes’s sunkissed production of Shakespeare’s comedy has arch, spirited performances from Amalia Vitale and Ekow Quartey as its central, wittily unwilling lovers, and a colour palette evoking blue Italian skies and ripe Seville oranges. The stylised trees on which these lustrous fruits hang conceal spikes, much like the plot."

"Beneath the banter and the highly efficient physical comedy, Holmes shows how things work in 16th century Messina."

"Vitale and Quartey make a fine double act. She’s slight, acid and droll. He’s big and ebullient but easily aggrieved. There’s a performative element to their careless independence, manifested in the relationship each of them builds with the audience of groundlings in the Globe’s pit"

"An exercise in pure joy at the Globe"

"Sean Holmes’s production for Shakespeare’s Globe has plenty of uncomplicated warmth and wit"

"... it’s a pleasure to report that Sean Holmes’s latest production, set in the Italy of the playwright’s time, is an exercise in pure, uncomplicated joy. If the temperature on press night was less than springlike, the visuals glowed with warmth and Mediterranean sunshine."

"The period costumes are glorious, especially in the extravagant masked dance scene, while Grant Olding’s seductive music, jauntily performed by an itinerant band, never seems intrusive, which hasn’t always been the case at this venue."

"Frothy fun to please the purists"

"There’s no whiff of stuffiness in a Sean Holmes production characterised by warm summer euphoria, Elizabethan-era magic and entrancing music"

"The Globe so often comes under fire for tampering with tradition but here is Shakespeare’s play on love, deception, male singledom and female purity that should please the purists. Its comedy is delivered straight, as it were, complete with Elizabethan-era costumes that contain the production’s greatest wow factor."

"Both Amalia Vitale’s quick, witty, ardent Beatrice and Ekow Quartey’s loveably pompous Benedick are entertaining highlights as they exchange comic sallies. Although their bristling love/hate chemistry never quite fizzes, you feel the tenderness of their union at the end."

"There is a more glaring lack of synergy between the central lovers, Hero and Claudio (Adam Wadsworth), whose romance feels indistinct. This takes the shock out of the Claudio’s rejection of Hero, so that the play’s uneasy blend of comedy and near-tragedy strikes an even greater dissonant note."

"Lack of chemistry"

"Sean Holmes’ take on the Messina-set comedy is more sour than sweet"

"This version, directed by Sean Holmes, is a visual feast and boasts some standout performances. But there’s frustratingly little gelling between the characters, leaving the eventual coupling-up underwhelming. And while Holmes delves admirably into the story’s darker moments, letting Leonato’s vile disowning of his daughter hang heavy in the air, a residual sourness renders the happy ending unconvincing."

"While this production has both style and substance, the lack of chemistry between its lovers leaves a sour aftertaste."

"Sean Holmes’s orange-drenched take on Shakespeare’s classic comedy is a cartoonish joy"

"Shakespeare’s Globe launches its summer season with this sparkling staging of one of the bard’s best comedies. It’s a sun-drenched spectacle that makes full use of the theatre’s crowd-pleasing openness and opportunity for audience interaction."

"The cleverness of Globe associate artistic director Sean Holmes’s production is to steer even harder into the comedy in the first half"

"Amalia Vitale is an effervescent Beatrice, with almost too much life to be contained by circumstances as she lampoons people left, right and centre. She spars with Ekow Quartey’s Benedick – who is charmingly awkward and brilliantly far from suave here – with an almost gleeful degree of eye-rolling."

"A warm, witty and controversy-free start to the Globe’s summer season"

"Purists will rejoice at Sean Holmes’s traditional, sun-soaked spin on Shakespeare’s comedy – despite its glossing over of darker themes"

"Sean Holmes’s new production lets us forget about the fact that we’re still wrapped up in winter coats by whisking us away to the blisteringly hot climes of Renaissance Italy, with beautifully-styled orange trees and crates full of fruit populating the stage to create a sun-soaked, golden hue. With the men returning from war, it’s time for a battle of the sexes. Let the chaos commence."

"Holmes keeps things simple: there are no elaborate tricks in the famous ‘gulling’ scenes, where Beatrice and Benedick’s friends fool them into acknowledging their emotions. The slapstick is efficient but effective."