Much Ado About Nothing

About this event

Director Tina Lanik retrieves the bitter core from Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy. Soldiers return from war to the court of Leonato, where Claudio instantly falls for Hero, while Benedick and Beatrice resume their caustic verbal sparring. A masked ball, a double wedding plot, and a spiteful intrigue by Don John soon threaten to unravel everything. Lanik’s production frames the romance in a low, neon-lit box on a pink-and-blue chessboard floor – a deliberate echo of the gender stand-off at the story’s heart. The staging veers from slapstick and self-mocking dance interludes (yoga mania meets masked ball) to stark moments where humiliated women finally speak out. Arash Nayebbandi and Annie Nowak fire off screwball skirmishes as Benedick and Beatrice, while Sebastian Kuschmann doubles as the noble Don Pedro and his embittered half-brother Don John. A new monologue by Lisa Wentz lets Hero break her 400-year silence, turning the courtroom scene into a confrontation with the men on stage and in the audience. The Frauenchor Frankfurt and a score by Cornelius Borgolte add live vocal texture throughout the roughly two-hour, interval-free evening.