You get the sense that she refuses to admit she likes Benedick – let alone settle down with him – both because she fears vulnerability, and because love is just a bit cringe: here, Soutra Gilmour fantastically ballsy design fills the stage with a gigantic, floor-to-ceiling inflatable love heart while seemingly-neverending drifts of pink confetti speckle the air around them.
Lloyd's production bravely ditches the play's comic subplot and sidelines the younger nominal romantic leads Hero (Mara Huf) and Claudio (James Phoon) even more than is traditional, in favour of the more fun (and, here, far more famous) Beatrice and Benedick, who have a huge amount of fun with their banter-filled romance.
Why scrap this play's comic subplot and chuck out all set apart from a 15ft high inflatable heart and several truckloads of pink confetti – without doing more to make sense of this seemingly permissive crew's sudden life-or-death obsession with Hero's maidenhead?
With a winning air of knowing smugness, he quips, vamps and wiggles his bum (quite a lot) through the role of Benedick in Jamie Lloyd's calculatedly naff, Noughties pop-ballad-filled reimagining of Much Ado About Nothing.
Even a many-tentacled alien who was blissfully ignorant of concepts like celebrity casting would surely – if beamed into the confines of Theatre Royal Drury Lane – get the impression that Tom Hiddleston is something of a big deal in these quarters.
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