Categories
Early Modern and Shakespeare Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Theatre Review: Much Ado About Nothing by the Jamie Lloyd Company, at the Theatre Royal Drury Lane

Izzi is a Master’s student on the Shakespeare Studies MA at King’s and the Globe Theatre, having completed her undergraduate degree in Classics and English at the University of Oxford. As her MA suggests, she loves all things Shakespeare and early modern drama, and she regularly watches and reviews modern productions of Shakespeare plays. Although you wouldn’t know it from how much she loved Much Ado, Izzi’s research focuses on bodily violence on the early modern stage.

Izzi has written the below review for the most recent production of Much Ado About Nothing (2025): Jamie Lloyd Company, Theatre Royal Drury Lane.

Verdict: 5 stars

Coming off the back of his rather dark and pessimistic production of The Tempest, Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing couldn’t be more refreshingly different. The bleak and barren sand dunes of Prospero’s island have been swapped for a stage covered in bright pink confetti, with a massive pink heart floating at the back of the stage. Lloyd re-imagines Shakespeare’s Sicilian comedy in a world of 90s disco, glittery jumpsuits, and massive Masked Singer-cum-Disneyland headpieces to absolutely fabulous success.

While in his Tempest the casting of Sigourney Weaver as a female Prospero was somewhat disappointing, Lloyd’s choice of Hollywood A-listers in the form of Marvel’s Tom Hiddleston and Hayley Atwell is inspired. The pair’s flirtatious repartee during the opening scenes perfectly captures the constant exchange of digs between Beatrice and Benedick, Messina’s most eligible bachelor and bachelorette. Both make perfect use of their Hollywood heartthrob status when appealing to the audience: Hiddleston delivers Benedick’s iconically self-centred line ‘I am loved of all ladies’ to rapturous applause and wolf-whistles, and the two of them seem to delight in dancing suggestively together wherever possible. The pair’s physical comedy during their respective trickery scenes is delightful, with Hiddleston’s attempts to hide himself with armfuls of pink confetti bringing the house down.

The production is high energy, high camp, and high fun-factor, motivated by a soundtrack of 90’s bangers, often sung by Mason Alexander-Park’s Margaret, accompanied by group dance numbers. That is, until a poignant switch in mood created by Claudio’s bitter condemnation of Hero at the altar for her alleged infidelity, egged on by Don John, played by Tim Steed. Steed brilliantly approaches the tricky John the Bastard plotline by showing himself consciously adopting the persona of a vaudevillian villain, complete with pantomime ‘mwah-hah-hah-hah’, in order to wreak havoc in Don Pedro’s court. His seemingly frivolous mischief, however, creates terrible consequences for Mara Huf’s Hero, whose speech in defence of her honour is powerfully resonant in a post Me Too world. This tricky scene, which can leave a bitter taste in the mouth of a modern audience when the couple reconcile, was expertly navigated: I was pleasantly surprised to find myself genuinely happy for Hero and Claudio when they reunite at the end of the play alongside the loved-up Beatrice and Benedick.

Jamie Lloyd’s Much Ado About Nothing is an absolute must-see if you’re a fan of Shakespeare, a fan of theatre, a fan of disco, a fan of Tom Hiddleston, a fan of pink… the list goes on.

By Izzi Strevens

Categories
Early Modern and Shakespeare

Shakespeare Centre London and Shakespeare’s Globe 2024 Graduate Conference

The annual Shakespeare Centre London’s post-graduate conference, hosted by both King’s College London and The Globe, takes place 10th-11th May. With Dr Natalya Din-Kariuki, Professor Tiffany Stern and Rob Myles as plenaries, the event promises to be a fascinating meeting of scholarly interests and academic disciplines, exploring what the term ‘Innovation’ means to our understanding of the early modern today.

Categories
Creative Practice, Performance and Theatrical Culture Early Modern and Shakespeare Gender and Sexuality

Review: The Masks of Aphra Behn by Claire Amias

By Amalia Costa

The year is 1677, and Aphra Behn has gatecrashed her own play. Instead of a pre-scheduled performance of The Rover, Behn takes to the stage to tell the story of her life up until this point, in a one-woman show by Claire Amias, whose charismatic portrayal of Behn reveals a character study rich in humour and pathos.

Categories
Early Modern and Shakespeare Insights

KURF: Reflections of a Summer as an Undergraduate Research Fellow at King’s

By Fatima Khan

Third-year English Literature student Fatima Khan reflects on her experience as an Undergraduate Research Fellow as part of King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship (KURF).

This year, I spent the summer working as an Undergraduate Research Fellow as part of King’s Undergraduate Research Fellowship Programme, also known as KURF.

Categories
Early Modern and Shakespeare Insights

Teaching opportunities in Early Modern and Victorian literature

The Department of English currently has hourly-paid teaching opportunities in Early Modern and Victorian literature for 2022/23.

Early Modern Teaching
Semester One
Convene and teach a second-year module, 5AAEB066 Poetry of Revolution, including lectures and three 1-hour seminar groups (40 hours)
Semester Two
Convene and teach an MA option module, 7AAEM836 Contested Voices in Early Modern England (20 hours)

Victorian Teaching
Semester 1
Convene and teach a second-year module, 5AAEB024 Victorians and the Making of the Modern World, including lectures and two 1-hour seminar groups (30 hours)
Semester 2
Teach on a second-year module, 5AAEB041 Wilde Times: Aesthetics and Politics in the 1890s: two 1-hour seminar groups weekly
Convene and teach a first-year module, 4AAEA015 Ghosts, Vampires, Monsters and Werewolves: Writing the Uncanny in the Nineteenth Century: lectures and two 1-hour seminar groups (30 hours)
Convene and teach a third-year module, 6AAEC119 Raw Victorians: Race, Environment and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Literature: one 2-hour seminar weekly (20 hours)

Please see attached for more information and to apply:

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Closing date: July 19th 2022, 5pm.


Blog posts on King’s English represent the views of the individual authors and neither those of the English Department, nor of King’s College London.