Much Ado About Nothing review

Robin Colyer’s lively, nostalgic score helps sell the period setting, drawing on soft jazz and mambo rhythms, along with swelling cinematic strings. The committed cast plays some instruments, and Priscille Grace particularly stands out singing a fine, warm version of Nat King Cole classic When I Fall in Love, maintaining impressive concentration as an uproariously slapstick sequence unfolds all around her.

Katherine Jack makes a charming, witty Beatrice, performing above-it-all breeziness in public but allowing her loneliness to show in private moments. Isolated by her intelligence and high standards, she yearns for a sincere emotional connection. James Mack is an appealingly merry Benedick, exchanging the prideful cockiness that often defines the character for an affable flippancy. Individually, both are strong, although together, they never quite achieve the spiky, sparky chemistry that they should.

Thuliswa Magwaza is strong as publicly disgraced Hero, a softly spoken wallflower who finds her voice and her deeply buried rage when she rails against the societal double standards driving the fabricated scandal that engulfs her. Augustina Seymour plays Don John, here explicitly recast as a woman. She finds a believable motivation for her villainy in her frustration with the exploitation and limited opportunities that she sees everywhere in the film industry. Some cannily delivered lines transform her speeches into direct challenges to the systemic sexism of the studio system.

That is an interesting angle, but it feels under-explored, clumsily shoehorned into a cheery, high-spirited production that – like so many Hollywood products – favours style and simplicity over substance.