Much Ado About Nothing, RSC, Stratford - Messina FC scores on the bardic football field

Fragile egos abound. An older person (usually a man) has to bring the best out of the stars, but mustn’t neglect the team ethic. Picking the right players is critical. There’s never enough money, because everything that comes in this season is spent on the next. The media, with a sneer never too far from the old guard and its new version alternately snapping and fawning with little in between, has to be placated.

You have to keep going out there, no matter how much it hurts the body or mind, as an audience always awaits. And yet you know, with total certainty, that these are the best days of your life. So, theatre or football?

Put like that, it’s surprisingly that more productions do not draw on the lure of a football setting – betting without Dear England natch – but ask no more! Michael Longhurst’s new production of Much Ado About Nothing takes us into the dressing room of Messina FC after a Champions League win, plunge pool and all, with jubilant players, an owner with a Berlusconi barnet and would-be WAGS lurking. Cue plenty of ducking and diving (metaphorical and literal), as duplicity first loses and then wins the day. Naturally, as with this venue's recent Hamlet on board the Titanic, there’s a bit of shoehorning to corral Shakespeare’s medieval characters and period into present day Sicily, but perhaps less than expected. Pleasingly, especially when the kits and boots give way in the second half to the kind of suits that sportsmen ought to wear well, but so few do, the cultural elements of elite football are foregrounded and subtly condemned. Wealthy alpha males butt up against each other – given with too much too young for their psychology to catch up, they fall too easily into traps seeded with jealousy and pricked self-esteem. And the women – well, more of them later.

Benedick is an ageing pro who has seen it all before and is left slightly cold by the euphoric celebrations and those tuneless songs so beloved of happy men. He had a fling long ago with Beatrice, the sharp-tongued journalist, but is now sworn off marriage and women, though he doth protest too much. Of course, the more the bantz expresses their mutual loathing, the more certain we are that they really ought to be together.

Meanwhile, Claudio (Daniel Adeosun), star player but insecure and easily led, has an eye for the well-heeled and high-heeled Hero, daughter of club chairman, Leonato (Peter Forbes). But the villainous Don John, bitter after missing out on the glory with an injury, recruits team manager Don Pedro, photographer, Borachio, and entourage girl, Margaret as a body double, in a plot to slutshame Hero. 

Jon Bausor’s set, something between Barbie’s pink palaces and Loro’s Bunga Bunga parties, catches the riche so nouveau that they haven’t worked out how to spend it – it’s wonderfully gaudy work, but, as much of the production succeeds in doing, it stops just short of patronising its characters. 

That sensitivity comes through in the performances too. Tanya Franks gives her Antonia a tarty look, but she long ago made her peace with her husband Leonato’s philandering, behaviour that comes almost as expected in a world in which misogyny is so baked in it goes unremarked, unseen.  

Eleanor Worthington-Cox (pictured above with Freema Agyeman and Nick Blood) does fine accent work as Hero, her native Liverpudlian growing stronger as she finds her heart and soul in Claudio’s love, making his vicious jilting, in the full glare of livestreaming, all the more gruesome. Hero can often come across as too complicit in her absence of agency, too passive, too forgiving, but football is yet to have its #MeToo moment and, for all the advances in visibility of the women’s game (with its own Lioness Line stopping at Wembley), one feels that the modern version of Shakespeare’s "maidenhead" might still be the only currency women hold in that world. And, frighteningly, in the new polities emerging under the wave of populism sweeping democracies.  

If that’s the grim message for 2025, underpinned by projections of the social media pile-on that so often, so heartlessly hits vulnerable young people at their most vulnerable, Nick Blood and Freema Agyeman brighten our mood. They have a lot of fun with their off-on, probably off again, no, on for sure, lovers Benedick and Beatrice. Blood’s timing is a delight, particularly in his physical comedy, too often a neglected or overly slapstick element of The Comedies, but beautifully constructed by choreographer and movement director, Julia Cheng. Agyeman gets the disdain just right too, a partnership of equals demonstrably more fulfilling than poor Hero and proud Claudio superficial and imbalanced couple. 

Roll in some songs by SuRie, beautifully sung by Worthington-Cox and others, and a “My Way” from Forbes that would make Robbie Williams’ dad blanch, and it’s a rollicking couple of hours, with plenty of laughs and a sting that condemns football culture and a world too populated by hypocritical judges. It's a sobering message that gains power through it being understated rather than spelt out.

Maybe not a worldie, but worth a “Back of the Net” for sure!   

• Much Ado About Nothing at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre until 24 May
• More theatre reviews on theartsdesk