Nature abhors a vacuum, and so, I’m sure, would William Shakespeare. That the writer of plays which roused the London rabbles and sparked a moral panic so great that all the theatres of London were shut down – admittedly the Black Plague didn’t help – is so often ushered behind a velvet rope, hermetically sealed, pinned to a display board and forbidden to change, is a source of great frustration and confusion to those who love his irreverence, bawdiness and wit.

So it was a joy to watch as new life was breathed into Much Ado About Nothing in an inner west Sydney warehouse last night by a company of early-career creatives not afraid to embrace the pop side of The Bard, and to lean into the thousand romantic comedy tropes he launched. Thanks to some judicious cuts and departures from the original script, an in-the-round staging that brought the audience into the thick of the action, and a cast of actors with the maturity and skill to incorporate iambic pentameter into 21st-century idioms and speech patterns, this production was a reminder of how much fun Shakespeare can be.