“I do love nothing in the world so well as you: is not that strange?”
Tom Hiddleston is Benedick and Hayley Atwell is Beatrice. Two of their generation’s finest actors collaborate with director Jamie Lloyd again in this savagely funny and beautifully tender battle of wits.
Hiddleston and Atwell regularly break the fourth wall, flirting and riffing on their celebrity with the audience: one misfire is the introduction of life-size cutouts of their Marvel Cinematic Universe characters to the otherwise blissfully absurd scenes where their characters are tricked into loving each other. The simplicity of the staging and the licensed showboating of the stars gives an idea of what theatre in Shakespeare’s day might have been like, only with more Jagerbombs, airhorn blasts and disco lights.
A very game Hiddleston leans into the hamminess of the posturing Benedick, from his rock-star entrance amid a cloud of dry ice to his eyebrow-waggling audience flirtation (“I am loved of all ladies” indeed), madcap dad-dancing, or teasing of a buff chest by undoing his shirt buttons. The gulling scene is a total blast as he hides, unsuccessfully, in pink confetti, and even does a confetti spit take. Yet his eventual confession of love is stirringly sincere.
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1927 | Broadway |
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1959 | Broadway |
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1984 | Broadway |
Broadway Revival Broadway |
1987 | Off-Broadway |
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1988 | Off-Broadway |
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2001 | Off-Broadway |
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2004 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park Off-Broadway |
2011 | West End |
Shakespeare's Globe Production West End |
2012 | West End |
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2013 | Off-Broadway |
Theatre for a New Audience Production Off-Broadway |
2014 | Off-Broadway |
Public Theater's Shakespeare in the Park Off-Broadway |
2016 | West End |
Royal Shakespeare Company West End Revival Production West End |
2018 | West End |
Rose Theatre Kingston Ten-Year Anniversary Production West End |
2019 | Off-Broadway |
Shakespeare In the Park Off-Broadway |
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2025 | West End |
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