To judge by much of this Melbourne Theatre Company (MTC) production of Much Ado About Nothing, you might think that Shakespeare had written not a tragicomedy but a farce – and a poor farce at that. Director Mark Wilson – renowned, the program notes tell us, for his ‘radical’ adaptations of Shakespeare – pushes so hard at the comedy buttons that cheap laughs and risible characterisations overwhelm the play’s necessary tragic elements. When the production shows due regard to Shakespeare’s text, it is very good indeed. Too often, however, it misreads Shakespeare’s text entirely. When it does so, it is spectacularly bad.

Much Ado About Nothing opens in Messina, here rendered by a nondescript façade that looks like it might belong to some cheap roadside motel, not quite within sniffing distance of a beach. (We’re told in the program notes that it is a replica of an architect-designed St Kilda house whose frontage features a huge portrait of Pamela Anderson, a somewhat obscure allusion that, along with allusions to Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus and Caravaggio’s Medusa, adds little, if anything, to Wilson’s interpretation of the play.) 

A messenger arrives in Messina with news for the governor, Leonato: Don Pedro, the Prince of Aragon (played by John Shearman with something of an Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor air), is arriving soon with a party of soldiers. The prince and his men have recently put down a rebellion led by the prince’s bastard brother, Don John (a sadly miscast Chanella Macri). When the men enter – with the defeated and now-forgiven Don John in tow – thoughts of war turn to thoughts of love. Claudio, a young count who, despite looking like a ‘lamb’, has shown himself in battle to have the valour of a ‘lion’, declares himself in love with Hero, Leonato’s daughter. Thus begins a plot in which Shakespeare not only questions the nature of love, but also the ability of men to leave behind the swaggering brotherhood fostered by war and adapt themselves to a social order dependent, if not necessarily on love, then at least on marriage.

Much Ado About Nothing by the Melbourne Theatre Company (phototograph by Gregory Lorenzutti)

Shakespeare’s commentary on love, and on men’s conception of women as creatures who cannot be trusted when it comes to matters of sex – in this world women are, crudely put, either virgins or whores – is fashioned not merely by the near-tragedy that comes of the pairing of Hero and Claudio, but also via the reluctant lovers Beatrice and Benedick. The pair have a past – hinted at by Beatrice – and are now sworn adversaries: each insist that they will never marry. Moreover, they would prefer to endure all manner of trials and torments than ever marry the other. The heat of their loudly declared hate obscures, of course, a fiery attraction; and Shakespeare’s plotting offers rich comic potential in the scenes where, in one of the key deceptions of play, Don Pedro concocts a scheme whereby the pair will be gulled into believing the other is secretly in love with them.

The scenes are designed, both by Don Pedro in his scheming and Shakespeare in his plotting, to make the pair seem ridiculous, all the better to undermine their lofty insistence that they are beyond the reach of love's arrows. As the reluctant lovers, Alison Bell and Fayssal Bazzi shine, plucking at just the right notes in Shakespeare’s dialogue and imbuing their relationship with both bravado and vulnerability. Paradoxically, perhaps, they seem more comfortable firing barbs at each other than speaking soft words. Once their love is acknowledged, much of the spark between them fizzles out.

What’s inexplicable about this production is that Wilson makes so little of the inherent comedy in those scenes where Beatrice and Benedick are gulled, designed by Shakespeare to be one of the antic highlights of the play. In Wilson’s staging, they elicit the occasional guffaw, but much of their potential comedy is left unmined. For Benedick’s gulling scene – where what is being said on stage is less important than Benedick’s reaction to the fabricated tales about Beatrice’s love for him – Wilson has Benedick secreting himself off-stage and, figuratively, out of focus.

The muting of the comedy in the gulling scenes might be compared to scenes where Wilson forces a juvenile humour into episodes that demand – if the balance of tragedy and comedy in the play is not to careen too far in one direction – a more even hand. How, for example, does one even begin to explain why Wilson has Don Pedro – a man who, in that moment of the play, is ruing his own gullibility – dancing a jig at Hero’s tomb?

More alarming still is Wilson’s characterisation of Don John. Half-brother to the prince, Don John is often named as one of the weaknesses in the plot of Much Ado About Nothing (why are the men so ready to believe someone whose rebellion has just been defeated and who is known for his lies and treachery?) Shakespeare scholar Emma Smith refers to Don John as a ‘wooden’ character, granted just enough agency and villainy to expose the potentially tragic flaws in characters such as Don Pedro, Claudio, and Leonato without ever steering the play towards complete tragedy (there are echoes of Don John in Iago from Shakespeare’s later play Othello, while Romeo & Juliet, which predates Much Ado, offers a template for how this play might have ended, had its tragic elements not been tempered). However, as much of a problem as Don John might prove in performance, the answer to that problem is not to turn him into a pantomime villain complete with Harpo Marx wig; a caricature whose every fiendish utterance is accompanied by a puerile sting of ominous music. Every time Don John is on stage, you cannot help but ask (as Emma Smith asks of Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale): ‘What the fuck?’

Wilson also plays fast and loose with the scene in the play around which Don John’s deceptions pivot: the performance played out by Don John’s henchman Borachio (in Wilson’s reading, more bogan schoolboy than the brains behind Don John’s subversive operation) and Hero’s unwitting maid Margaret, and meant to convince Claudio and Don Pedro that Hero is unfaithful. Shakespeare, quite deliberately, allows this deception to take place off stage, thus increasing the tension. How convincing a staging were Don John and Borachio able to conjure? Are the rumours, spread by Borachio, that Claudio is about to slut-shame Hero at the altar true? It is not unusual for a contemporary production to enact the scene, the credibility of the staging of Borachio and Margaret/Hero’s midnight rendezvous a marker of whether the director wants us to perceive Don Pedro and Claudio as fools or, as the play text marks them, villains (one of Shakespeare’s principal concerns being who deserves to be named the play’s villain).

What Wilson gives us at Hero’s window is a soft-porn tangle of sexual acts, no permutation overlooked. As such, this is not so much a potentially dangerous deceit as a fatuous one, never mind the clear dissimilarities between the physiques of Hero and Margaret. To have mistaken one for the other, Claudio and Don Pedro would need to have been watching the events at Hero’s window from several miles away.

Given Much Ado About Nothing is written mainly in prose, it should be one of the easier of Shakespeare plays for actors to master, but several of the younger actors flounder. This is most obvious in the interplay between Claudio (Remy Heremaia embracing all the callowness and vacuity of the character) and Hero (Miela Anich), whose love-at-almost-first-sight pairing fails to act as the mandatory counterweight to the Beatrice-Benedick subplot. Even given how silent and self-effacing a character Hero is meant to be, the coolness of those moments where Hero and Claudio interact rob Claudio’s later refusal to marry her, and his subsequent contrition (as half-hearted as it may be), of their heat.

Even those actors who speak Shakespeare’s dialogue as though it were their first language aren’t helped by the cavernous black box of the MTC sound stage – wings and backstage area fully exposed – within which sits the Pamela Anderson house (set design by Anna Cordingly). Neither the actors nor the action is big enough to fill the space, diminishing the intensity of both the performances and the play itself. A questionable sound design (by Joe Paradise Lui) doesn’t help matters. The pantomime stings aside, the tonal palette of the play is confused by the inclusion of the love theme from Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of Romeo and Juliet, as well as Mendelssohn’s wedding march, written for A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

The muddiness of this production is best demonstrated in two scenes from the fourth act of the play: the aftermath of Hero and Claudio’s wedding, and the ensuing scene where Benedick and Beatrice declare their love. With little room here for Wilson to tamper with the tone of the scenes, the four actors involved (Bell, Bazzi, Syd Brisbane – who invests Leonato with a dynamic blend of gravitas and intemperance – and Julie Forsyth as the Friar) bring to the moment the full weight of Hero’s apparent shame as well as all the tentative emotions that mark undeclared, and possibly unreciprocated, love. The actors make Shakespeare’s words their own, embracing all the drama and poignancy of their interactions in a way that makes you lament what might be missing from other key episodes of the play. However, as moving and commanding as the scene is, it is undermined by the constant distraction of the stage crew stirring about behind them and ‘off-stage’ actors visible in the wings, changing their costumes and awaiting their next cue. If this is an attempt to stress the thematic significance of appearance, performance, and deception in the play, it misfires badly.

Mention must be made of the true star of this production, Julie Forsyth, who, in a handful of smaller roles (most notably the clown character Dogberry, chaotic keeper of the Messina peace), offers a masterclass in comic, physical acting.  She makes some of her characters’ sharp pivots from comedy to tragedy and back again seem almost effortless.

There are plenty of laughs in this MTC production of Much Ado About Nothing, and much that will entertain and even move audiences. But for those looking to discover something of what Shakespeare had to say about deceit, iniquity, justice, and the objectification of women, they are likely to find Wilson’s interpretation of the play sorely lacking.

Much Ado About Nothing (Melbourne Theatre Company) continues at the Southbank Theatre until 19 December 2025. Performance attended: 19 November 2025.