Preview: Much Ado About Nothing

As always it is a really challenging but fun task finding a play for all our young people to perform in. We always workshop ideas with the group and see what kind of text resonates with them. We spent several weeks this year trying out different texts, from classical retellings, verbatim devised work, connections plays and classic texts we explored lots of different perspectives and characters. Interestingly, what came out of this was a desire from our young people to work on a classical Shakespearean text. We loved their excitement to work with the Bard and really wanted to make this happen.

Often plays for young people focus on very heavy themes and issues which is important in learning how to perform a wide range of characters, but we hadn’t touched much on comedy recently. We started exploring Much Ado after they had requested to explore some classical texts, and found hearing the cast speak the words with such understanding and humour solidified it as our choice for their show this year! We felt they really got the themes (which are quite adult at times!) and engaged with them. All of this together made it the clear winner for our production this year!

As with working on Shakespeare with anyone, it’s about not being intimidated by the language. Once we get over that first hurdle, it’s just the same as working on anything else. We discuss the character, the themes and intention as well as doing a lot of ‘translating’ on the spot during rehearsals. By not being intimidated, it’s allowed us to encourage new interpretations of the text and be really liberal in making it relevant and interesting to everyone in 2025.

We really love being able to incorporate the actors’ ideas into our overall vision for the piece. Much Ado has been really great for this as there are so many comic moments that our actors can contribute to. We have some truly original and interesting interpretations and ideas during the rehearsal process, and this is always a joy.

This is something that’s part of our practice as facilitators for the South London Theatre Youth groups, from the 6 year-olds’ ideas all the way until they’re 18 and moving on. As we always say, ‘strong and wrong’ is always better than nothing at all, even if it’s an idea we can’t bring to life in the final product (such as every character wearing a fedora…!)

We’re setting this production in the mid-90s as we always see trends come round every 20-30 years or so, and felt aesthetically our actors could connect to this time period. The young people do have to costume themselves a lot (due to the sheer number of them), so finding something 90s felt like an achievable goal.

We’ve kept the original Italian setting as this has allowed us to inflect a sense of summer holiday silliness to the depths of south London winter! With the 90s comes a rich musical backdrop, and we’ve had great fun putting in iconic tunes that our young people now call ‘retro’!

Silly, ambitious, slapstick.