26 February 2025

London’s season of sexed-up Shakespeare

New productions of Richard II and Much Ado About Nothing both burnish their texts with hot celebrity appeal – but couldn’t be further apart aesthetically.

Two contemporary stagings of Shakespeare opened in London this week. Though both attempt to locate the playwright in the present moment through knowing production design, modern soundtracks and a handsome Hollywood actor, they couldn’t be further apart in aesthetics. Much Ado About Nothing, directed by Jamie Lloyd with Marvel’s Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as Benedick and Beatrice, is a riot of magenta confetti, air horns and pop music. Richard II, directed by Nicholas Hytner and starring Jonathan Bailey (Wicked, Bridgerton), is sleek and moody, with a score evoking HBO’s Succession.

In Much Ado, we are transported to a gaudy disco with glitterballs in the boxes, the cast singing into Britney mics and shimmying to “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)”. There is much slapstick as characters hide from each other under the mounds of confetti on stage. Hiddleston comes on to a remix of the Beastie Boys’ “Fight for Your Right” with boy-band-style choreography, and sings Benedick’s love song to the tune of the Backstreet Boys’ “I Want It That Way”. He unbuttons his satin shirt or performs lines such as “Certain I am loved of all ladies” with a wink – as if letting us know he knows how embarrassing this could be, but he’ll have fun with it. I braced myself to hate it ten minutes in – but it won me over with its sheer exuberance and charisma.

In a compelling, dark Richard II, Bailey plays the deposed king as petulant and vain. He is arrogant and impish – with shades of a toddler-tyrant – as he does lines of coke with his advisers, or takes the grapes from beside his uncle’s deathbed and pops them into his mouth while casually disinheriting his cousin. It’s a comic performance throughout: he is ridiculous even as he is humbled, rambling in rage or pathetically self-pitying. Returning from Ireland, he produces his crown from a plastic bag, wrapped in a swim towel. And his declaration “I weep for joy/To stand upon my kingdom once again” is ironised by the set design: the king kisses a ground covered in waste and debris.

Much Ado About Nothing
Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, London WC2