The common perception is that the Royal Shakespeare Company exists in a state of constant crisis. In fact, the work on stage at Stratford this year has been mostly excellent. And Gregory Doran's Much Ado About Nothing, set in 1930s Sicily, transfers beautifully to the Haymarket, where its mixture of emotional reality and mythic power seems more enticing than ever.
The emotional honesty comes chiefly from the growing interaction between Harriet Walter's Beatrice and Nicholas le Prevost's Benedick. At first, sitting astride a motorbike, she has the faintly desperate larkiness of Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby. He, meanwhile, has settled into a routine of hard-drinking bachelor gruffness. But the moment when they finally come together is breathtaking. Walter, seething with anger throughout Hero's disgrace, turns "Kill Claudio" into an unarguable imperative; in response, Le Prevost suddenly sheds all his protective officers'-mess chappiness. What you are confronted by is the moving spectacle of two lonely people united by a grave domestic crisis.
The skill of Doran's production lies in its combination of social detail and folk-tale myth. The constant glimpses of shadowy figures behind curtains remind us that the whole plot hinges on a dubious piece of window-gazing, while the soldiers' recent return from Mussolini's Abyssinian campaign helps to explain the domestic fascism of John Hopkins's callow Claudio and the postwar anomie of Stephen Campbell-Moore's perverse Don John. Doran's real achievement, however, is to remind us of the play's origins in fable. When William Whymper's Friar proposes that the disgraced Hero be immured and that out of this travail will come "greater birth", we suddenly get a strange anticipation of the magical dreamscape that Shakespeare would explore in his late plays.
All too often Much Ado seems like a verbal fencing match attached to a shakily melodramatic plot. But Doran's production brilliantly unites the play's two halves by investing them both with a sense of wonder. In the expert hands of Walter and Le Prevost, the final union of Beatrice and Benedick seems not some stitched-up marital hoax but the redemptive maturation of two individuals rescued from a life of quirky solitude.
· Until August 22. Box office: 0870 609 1110.
