Much Ado About Nothing is now popping up everywhere

There’s much ado about Much Ado on the English stage this year. Shakespeare’s 1599 comedy is a perennial favourite: a bittersweet summer cocktail with some peachy parts and laugh-out-loud slapstick scenes. But this year offers a bonanza. We’ve already had two major productions — Roy Alexander Weise’s Afrofuturist-inspired RSC approach and Lucy Bailey’s wonderful garden-based staging for Shakespeare’s Globe. Now it is the turn of London’s National Theatre to stage this sun-kissed, sorrow-stained tale of love, with a beguilingly funny production led by Katherine Parkinson and John Heffernan.

So what is it about this play that has it popping up everywhere like daisies in summer? In part it’s that central pairing: Beatrice and Benedick, who hide their mutual attraction behind a barrage of scorn. There’s something immensely poignant in seeing these spiky individuals tricked into realising how much they love each other — and there’s a very recognisable, contemporary quality to them. The more they fight their feelings, the deeper they fall. That truth has inspired many innovative takes, including a hip-hop version and Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones as octogenarian lovers. Jeremy Herrin, who directed the play in 2011, described it as the “original romcom” and the pair feel like the template for so many couples: Harry and Sally, Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy, Ross and Rachel . . .

But running through the piece are deeper, darker questions. It’s a play that challenges romantic ideals of love: sweethearts Claudio and Hero hit the rocks spectacularly. It also interrogates toxic masculinity and the scourge of jealousy: the plot skirts close to Othello before swerving back to comedy. Also like Othello, it brings us a group of military men, bonded by war and uncertain how to behave around women. Perhaps it is that sudden sober glimpse of possessiveness and emotional abuse that gives the play such resonance in the #MeToo age, together with its honesty about the folly of male pride.

And throughout the play Shakespeare delights in inverting the norm: verbal abuse disguises love; deception and trickery reveal the truth. Beatrice and Benedick are hoodwinked into realising their feelings; Claudio is duped into accusing Hero of infidelity and then into realising his mistake; the dozy constable Dogberry and his hapless squad unwittingly reveal the malevolent hoax that has conned the young lover. All this comes wrapped in sparky dialogue and an initial mood of joyous post-conflict (and, now, post-lockdown) release.

Simon Godwin’s gorgeous, chic staging at the National Theatre handles this intoxicating mix of light and dark adroitly. Set in 1930s Italy, it begins in hedonistic mood and is laced with infectious music from an onstage swing band. The plot unfolds in the Hotel Messina, a chic pink and gold edifice that, in Anna Fleischle’s luscious design, fills the Lyttelton stage. Characters ride in art deco lifts, dance in suave, silky costumes and squabble beside a vista of hazy blue sea. The famous physical comedy scenes, in which Beatrice and Benedick hide to eavesdrop, involve some very droll business with a hammock and an ice cream trolley.

There’s a giddy, escapist feeling to events and, despite the period, no overt mention of fascism. But bubbling under all the mischief is something darker. There’s a sense of gender divide even in the design: the women chat in an elegant powder room; the men conspire in the showers. That divide becomes serious when Claudio jilts Hero. Ioanna Kimbook’s excellent Hero is not just shocked but furious and defiant. Suddenly the “merry war” between Beatrice and Benedick is replaced by genuine conflict between the sexes and the repressive misogyny of 1930s Italian society briefly breaks into this idyllic hideaway.

Against this backdrop, the journey of Beatrice and Benedick, subtly and precisely traced by Parkinson and Heffernan, acquires a touching honesty. Both are oddballs, out of step with their allotted roles in society: Parkinson’s Beatrice strides into the pastel-hued hotel foyer in a clashing yellow trouser suit; Heffernan skilfully reveals the insecurity behind Benedick’s banter. There’s a brittle, defensive quality to their teasing, which suggests they have both been hurt, and the shift when they let themselves fall in love with each other is deeply touching. Heffernan’s dazed disbelief as he emerges from his hiding-hole plastered in ice cream to exclaim “Love me? Why?” is endearing; his quiet shock at the aborted wedding (when he notably stays with the women, rather than leave with the men) is palpable.

Eben Figueiredo’s Claudio is visibly shaken when he realises that his macho posturing has done real damage. And this is a production flecked with revealing details: the malcontent Don John who stirs everything up (a pinched David Judge) is obliged to hand over a medal that will be bestowed on Claudio; the maid Margaret (Phoebe Horn) crumples quietly as she realises her own part in the duplicity. The bumbling nightwatchmen are amiably funny, led by David Fynn’s pleasingly absurd Dogberry.

Although the play doesn’t have the great depth of Shakespeare’s late dramas, it does, like them, move towards reconciliation and forgiveness. It’s about learning to be together, flaws and all. Perhaps too there is something about that journey of acquired wisdom and hope that appeals to post-lockdown audiences. Godwin’s production is sweet, sparky, sexy, sombre and, in the end, touching in its depiction of the transformative power of love. “I do love nothing in the world so well as you — is that not that strange?” says Heffernan’s Benedick in quiet astonishment.

More Much Ado arrives in September, this time at Sheffield’s Crucible Theatre.

★★★★☆

To September 10, nationaltheatre.org.uk; Shakespeare’s Globe to October 23, shakespearesglobe.com; Sheffield Crucible, September 9-24, sheffieldtheatres.co.uk. RSC production is available on BBC iPlayer