Making Shakespeare zip

According to a YouGov poll, the four most popular Shakespeare plays are, fairly predictably, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Hamlet. The relatively rarely performed Richard II is way down the list. Nicholas Hytner’s modern-dress production at London’s Bridge Theatre might shift it up a few places. 

The play charts the decline and fall of Richard at the end of his reign. Jonathan Bailey, fresh from Bridgerton and Wicked, plays the immature, narcissistic, vacillating monarch. His Richard is the suspect sort of fellow who wears velvet loafers with no socks. When it comes to kingship, he talks the talk but he can’t walk the walk. He is surrounded by noblemen who dress like contestants on The Apprentice. Indeed, Bailey’s king is not unlike an Apprentice participant himself — puffed up with an unjustified self-regard. He snorts cocaine with fawning courtiers. He is capricious. He makes a real mess of his God-given role, squandering public money on military adventures in Ireland.

It falls to his no-nonsense cousin Henry Bullingbrook (a charismatic Royce Pierreson), the future Henry IV, to sort things out. Bullingbrook is not much given to the flowery speechifying that the king favours. He knows that political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Enemies are dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head and at one point, a heavy field gun is wheeled onto the stage and trained on the king’s castle to persuade him that he and Bullingbrook really need to talk. 

In the deposition scene, the king, ever the drama queen, repeatedly offers Bullingbrook the “hollow crown” before theatrically pulling it back. By the time the chastened leader has achieved a measure of self-knowledge — “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me” — it’s too late.

The set is minimal, strewn with rubbish as the situation deteriorates. Sections of the thrust stage rise and fall. A table and chairs, a bed, arise from below. The planned fight between the feuding dukes Mowbray and Bullingbrook is set to take place in a sort of pit. The action is punctuated with music that evokes the theme tune of the TV drama Succession but here boardroom bros become battlefield belligerents.

Some scenes in Much Ado produced wave after wave of proper belly laughter rolling around the theatre

There is an occasional sense that Bailey is slightly playing to the gallery, campily milking laughs from what is not usually regarded as one of Shakespeare’s more hilarious works. On the other hand, there is a lot of macho posturing and constant throwing down of “gages” — which is how the squabbling nobles issue challenges — that does lend itself to ridicule. Meanwhile, Michael Simkins is compelling as an older, wiser head, the Duke of York, a political pragmatist whose ultimate loyalty is to the realm rather than Richard.

Due to the indisposition of Clive Wood, his understudy Martin Carroll played Bullingbrook’s father, John of Gaunt, whose “This royal throne of kings, this sceptred isle” speech is probably the play’s best-known. This pacy, streamlined production does not labour contemporary political parallels but a couplet near the end of that speech, “That England that was wont to conquer others / Hath made a shameful conquest of itself”, did seem to resonate. A litter-strewn England was very on the money too.

If Richard II is something of a Shakespeare deep cut then Much Ado About Nothing is a greatest hits crowd-pleaser.

The club culture-inspired production currently running at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, directed by Jamie Lloyd, is a real treat. Like Richard II, it brings out the big guns, although metaphorically rather than literally, in the form of Hollywood stars Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell as Benedick and Beatrice, the original romcom enemies-to-lovers couple.

There are clues to the sort of show we’re in for even before the curtain goes up. Roving spotlights sweep the audience as we’re treated to a selection of old high-energy dance numbers such as “Ride on Time” by Black Box and “Good Life” by Inner City. The theatre staff holding up the notices urging you to switch off your phone do so while gamely grooving on down. 

Atwell, as Beatrice, seamlessly shifts from wit and waspishness into wholly convincing full-on rage

When the show begins, the stage is already covered by a thick carpet of the hot pink ticker tape that falls from above throughout much of what follows. The set is minimal: a few chairs, a giant inflatable heart hanging upstage. The cast are in the sort of costumes they might wear to go clubbing. Benedick is almost John Travolta-esque. Beatrice is in a slinky jumpsuit.

Benedick and his soldier pals fetch up in Sicily for a bit of post-battle party-hard R&R. Young Claudio falls for Hero, daughter of the local governor, and Benedick resumes his “merry war” with Hero’s quick-witted, sharp-tongued cousin, Beatrice. Beatrice and Benedick have a hinted-at romantic history and their friends decide to trick them into getting back together.

There is energetic dancing — Atwell and Hiddleston bust out some very impressive moves — and there are sequences of brilliantly performed, genuinely uproarious physical comedy. The masked ball and the eavesdropping scene, in which Benedick is persuaded that Beatrice has the hots for him, are staged with such verve and elan that they will set the bar against which future productions are measured for a long time. Wave after wave of proper belly laughter rolled around the theatre.

Such high-octane hilarity would be impossible to sustain throughout an entire performance even were there not a radical tonal change in the second half of the play. Thanks to the dastardly machinations of the villainous Don John, Hero is wrongly accused by her intended of being unfaithful and a furious Beatrice demands Benedick “kill Claudio”. Things get serious for a while.

Atwell, for my money the show’s standout, seamlessly shifts from the wit and waspishness Beatrice uses as a defence against her vulnerability into wholly convincing full-on rage mode, all hell-hath-no-fury. Similarly, Hiddleston moves Benedick from arrogant, committed (but not confirmed) bachelor to besotted and tender suitor so smoothly you can barely see the join. When the pair eventually do get it together, their rapprochement elicits “ahhs” and a round of applause from the audience. 

Lloyd has cut the farcical subplot involving Dogberry and the Watch entirely and the whole thing zips along and is an absolute delight. Mind you, with the best seats going for £350, it should be.

Richard II at the bridgetheatre.co.uk runs until 10 May.

Much Ado About Nothing at lwtheatres.co.uk/whats-on/much-ado-about-nothing/ runs until 5 April.