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.)