Much Ado About Nothing review – frothy fun to please the purists

Globe theatre, London
There’s no whiff of stuffiness in a Sean Holmes production characterised by warm summer euphoria, Elizabethan-era magic and entrancing music

The Globe so often comes under fire for tampering with tradition but here is Shakespeare’s play on love, deception, male singledom and female purity that should please the purists. Its comedy is delivered straight, as it were, complete with Elizabethan-era costumes that contain the production’s greatest wow factor.

The masked ball, in which the disguised Don Pedro (Ryan Donaldson) woos Hero (Lydia Fleming) on behalf of Claudio, is a wonder to behold. There are elaborate and exquisite animal-themed beaks, manes and feathers that looks like a ravishingly surreal 16th-century fantasy come to life.