Showing at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Royal Shakespeare Theatre this month is a version of Much Ado About Nothing that side-steps the play’s original setting in favour of the world of professional football. And what’s more, the production comes complete with a celebrity wedding, fake news, and a swimming pool! Director Michael Longhurst spoke to What’s On about his bold new take on Shakespeare’s much-loved comedy…

Michael, why have you chosen this play, and why this setting?
I had a conversation with Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, the co-artistic directors of the RSC, and we were discussing various titles -  Much Ado was a title that crossed over on both of our lists. I was circling around it, trying to think about how I would bring it to life. I was mentally going through various historical wars, trying to find a setting for the play, and was not particularly inspired or excited by the ideas that I was having… What was interesting to me was, it's a group of men coming back from a victory - which started me thinking about the world of professional sport. As soon as that idea had risen in my mind, it became very exciting.
I think the play is about masculinity, about the dynamics of masculine relationships - brought into contact with feminine relationships. I was looking for figures within the world, and Silvio Berlusconi was someone I started researching - as soon as I understood that he was prime minister of Italy, a major owner of a media company and he was the president of AC Milan… that's literally what Leonato could be.

Can you describe what your rehearsal process has been like? 
Joyous! There’s something that happens when there are footballs to be kicked, and a bunch of guys that enjoy kicking footballs. There's an energy that automatically happens, which is amazing. What this has allowed us to do is to make a really unique world. The actors can be younger, because they're from the world of football, and it's a working-class sport, so I was determined that the voice and identity of the actors playing these roles would be authentic. I think that adds a really brilliant spin on how we might be used to hearing Shakespeare and what’s ‘the proper way’ to speak it. It's been really fun to hear how vivid the world is that we've collectively created. It's a play full of movement - with the masques and dances and all that jazz - and once you're trying to do comic sequences involving a swimming pool... it's been a lot of fun!

Did anything surprise you while you were directing?
I’m always surprised by how little contact Beatrice and Benedick actually have together in the play. They are technically the subplot that we all fall in love with as the leads, but it's extraordinary the speed of development in their relationship, with very little contact time. It's a masterclass in playwriting to watch how we're so quickly hooked into their relationship. We were just working on Act Four Scene One... What an extraordinary scene, starting with the wedding, where Claudio slanders Hero, through to Beatrice and Benedick declaring love to each other. It's just sort of epic to go from polite titters at a wedding, to the absolute trashing of someone's dreams and reputation - essentially the cancelling of someone - through to the rollercoaster of emotion into declaring love. It's the kind of thing that I can imagine in modern telly you'd be told by a script editor “That's not believable, take the edges off it.” Shakespeare just writes through it and doesn't let you simplify it, and that is extraordinary to stage and play. So watching the company get their teeth into such a big scene is really thrilling.

Are you a football fan, or have you come to this production from outside of that world?
In honesty, I am absolutely not a football fan. I have three brothers; they're all very sporty. Match Of The Day was on the telly on a Saturday, and I had to sit very quietly through it, and it was not my cup of tea. I have been football-adjacent. 
The job of directing is to become a mini expert before you go into rehearsal. Whether it's the conflict in the Middle East, or the climate emergency, or urban isolation, or quantum physics, - or, in this case, football! It's always something that, as a director, I'm trying to learn in a crash course… 
All our footballers went to meet players, training staff and members of the PR team at Watford Football Club. They came back with some extraordinary stories, which absolutely fuelled the characters. Once you do that work, you realise these kids have often been obsessively training on that one thing, from a very young age. They have been moved away from their families, and the team is their life. Their lives are controlled by the managers, and every bit of their life, every beat of their diet, is scheduled and controlled for them.
People love to come and share their stories in the rehearsal room, because theatre is an amazing medium for exploring facets of the world that we don't get to walk in ourselves. Or, if you have something important to say, we can be the means by which we share a discussion about it. The boys came back with amazing insights from their time with the footballers.

Of the play’s two love stories, which have you found most interesting to direct?
I think I identify more strongly with Beatrice and Benedick because of my age. Hero and Claudio are a very young couple; their love is speedy and instant, and historically would have been in the form of romantic chivalry. Today, it’s got sucked into the world of influencers and images - the surface veneer of it. Beatrice and Benedick are a much more experienced couple. The parallel between war and love in the original play really holds between sport and love - with the same sort of nationalistic language. We’re here to conquer enemies, we're here to vanquish, we're doing national service… those sorts of things. 
You have to ‘surrender’ to be in love. What does it mean to risk that at a certain age, when you may have been hurt in love before? I find it very moving to watch the two actors play all that wit, all the sharp, defensive, protective mechanisms, and then to watch that melt away - as it suddenly does. It's beautiful when that catches. When Freema Agyeman, who's playing Beatrice, declared her love for Benedick, I watched every eye in the rehearsal room wet immediately, and just thought - that’s good! It feels like we’re on to something.

Much Ado About Nothing shows at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon until Saturday 24 May