Much Ado About Nothing
A warm and dry evening lends itself perfectly to an evening at the Globe and this one didn’t disappoint. This is a traditional version of the play that surely would have satisfied the purists but without being stuffy at all. For the first half, the theatre was full of the lovely lightness and comedy of this classic enemies to lovers romcom. Ekow Quartey was an engaging and sweet Benedict and Amanda Vitalie turned in a great comic performance as a fiery fury of a Beatrice. The two secondary lovers were fairly insipid but that’s no fault of the actors; I’ve rarely seen performances that manage to lift those characters into something more interesting. The second half has a fairly clunky change of pace and tone, and always feels like a screeching handbrake turn to near tragedy but, in an echo of Romeo and Juliet, the priest’s suggestion to play dead works out this time and so we get our happy ending. The bit that really grates though is the shocking misogynistic about turn from L