It’s Sicily in Stratford-upon-Avon, and this week it certainly feels like it. It’s 23 degrees at 4pm. As the evening descends, the sunlight softens and grows warm. Minutes stretch uncaged across the lawns outside the theatre. The swans on the Avon make hardly a ripple in the stillness, and the bronze statue of Shakespeare, palm outstretched and polished shiny as a pope’s ring, generates an inner warmth as day gives way to dusk. On such a night as this do young men’s minds turn to love… and football.

It's part of a critic’s job to go into every production with an open mind. But with this Much Ado About Nothing the RSC has been so open about Director Michael Longhurst’s concept that it’s hard not to embark on it without some preconceptions. ‘Shakespeare’s original rom-com set in the world of top-flight football and celebrity culture, where scandal-filled rivalries are the hottest new thing and lads and WAGs collide’ says the website. It sounds fun, but what’s got into the RSC? They seem to have gone all high-concept and down-market. Hamlet on the Titanic was thrilling but involved stretching the play to breaking point just to fit the director’s conceit. Now we get Much Ado translated to Sky Sports. But will this be the Parc des Princes or Craven Cottage? We’ll find out in the next ninety minutes.

The set is a thrill. It has all the pizzazz of modern TV sports coverage, with moving graphics, onscreen stats, and a view of the stadium from inside the players’ tunnel. The perspective is so exaggerated that it feels vertiginous and giddy, the roar of the crowd intoxicating. There is even the odd in-joke (Gremio, the doddering pantaloon from Taming of the Shrew playing on the wing? I don’t think so).

Then the play starts. And almost from kick-off the Big Idea starts to unravel.

The first thing a purist will notice is the line changes. ‘Lords’ have become ‘Managers’. ‘Killing’ has become ‘scoring’. ‘Books’ have become ‘smartphones’. ‘Dancing’ has become, yes, ‘twerking’. But I’m not a purist: Shakespeare has been dead a long time, and you can do whatever you like with his plays. They’ll be fine. The question is not how respectful you are to the dramatist, but how successful you are in creating something new. If a director has found a modern parallel, then what matters is whether that interpretation actually makes sense on its own terms. And that’s where this production starts to struggle.

In the opening scene Freema Agyeman’s Beatrice, a TV football pundit, immediately bursts into a personal tirade against Nick Blood’s Benedick, the Captain of ‘Messina FC’, seconds after he’s won the European Cup. Why would any professional sports correspondent do that? Whisper at back of head: it doesn’t make sense. Even more confusingly, it’s hard to see why the villainous Don John (Nojan Khazai) has such a grudge against the other characters. In the original play he has literally been at war with them, and, although treated with courtesy, has been taken captive (as he says, ‘enfranchised with a clog’). But here he’s a member of the same team. He’s stripped of a motive. The whisper gets louder.

Hero’s maidservant Margaret (here reimagined as a PR executive for LeoCo) is, in the original play, an innocent pawn in Don John’s and Borachio’s plot. Here she is a willing co-conspirator. In an early scene we see her giving club owner Leonato a blow-job while he’s on the phone to his wife. In anger he throws her aside, and for revenge she eagerly joins in the plan to meddle with Hero’s wedding plans, even taking some of Borachio’s lines. And yet in the end she is declared blameless. It doesn’t make sense.

Most egregiously of all, the stratagem to defame Hero and cross Claudio, based on a deliberately mistaken identity, is modernised here to deepfaking Margaret’s head onto Hero’s body. It’s an obvious idea, but the problem is, in the world that Longhurst is depicting, no one would fall for that for a moment. Today’s footballers, and the world in which they live, are completely aware of the pitfalls of photo manipulation. They have to deal with it all the time. If this were to happen nowadays, the victim would just say, ‘It’s a deepfake innit?’ The essential crux on which the entire plot turns has been undermined, and it makes the whole production unconvincing.

So despite the sets, the costumes, the impressive physiques and the verbal alterations, the football analogy just doesn’t work. And watching the company try to wrestle it into place is like watching a team of torturers trying to hold down and cut the fingers off a struggling, innocent victim. You just want to shout out, ‘Leave him alone!’

To be clear: I welcome experimentation and I relish disrespect. But that’s not a licence for superficial messing around. It’s an invitation to challenge preconceptions, and to explore with intelligence original ideas which may succeed or fail. Longhurst’s production doesn’t do that. It’s just a concept Uhu’d to a script. It’s like taking a paint-roller loaded with Dulux Kiss-Me Pink and slapping it onto an original William Morris wallpaper: tacky, cackhanded and tasteless.

It's also astonishingly inconsistent. Having filled every corner of the first half of the evening with unconvincing football analogies, after the interval the idea is almost completely cast aside. It literally vanishes. But this doesn’t improve matters because it leaves our poor cast of characters flailing in a world now deprived of the one iota of meaning it had. The impression is that the creative team simply ran out of ideas. I was reminded of the Woody Allen joke about the two women at a Catskills resort: ‘The food here is terrible. – Yes, and such small portions.’

In any case, the whole idea of Lad Culture and WAGs is painfully out of date. Clare Thorp’s interesting essay in the programme talks about the relevance of this production in the wake of the Coleen Rooney/Emma Vardy court case, Joey Barton’s misogynist outbursts and Vicki Sparks being criticised by the male-dominated establishment of the Football Leagues. But these events are pre-Covid. The world has moved on. Sparks is now rightly recognised as one of the top commentators currently working. Women’s football continues to break records, and the Lionesses are role-models for men, women and children of all genders. Mary Earps was the BBC Sports Personality of the Year 2024. This feels like Much Ado About 2018.

The cast, for the most part, play the hand they’ve been dealt with professional and grim determination. Daniel Adeosun as Claudio is the standout, capturing the dim, chauvinistic centre-forward with a heart of gold. Blood’s Benedick is far more comfortable once he is freed from having to behave like a footballer, and can revert to a more conventional, love-struck misanthrope. Freema Agyeman is the second former Dr Who Assistant to take on the role of Beatrice in a major production (following Catherine Tate in 2011), and – like Tate – she sadly isn’t quite up to the role. Agyeman was the one weak link in Prasanna Puwanarajah’s recent, magnificent Twelfth Night. But as Olivia she was a secondary lead. Here there is nowhere to hide. Her lack of projection sounds reedy and underpowered, and her determination to play against the natural rhythm of the poetry sounds not realistic but unguided. At the curtain call I saw no smiles from the performers. Instead, there were polite nods and shifty glances. They spoke volumes.

The RSC is our premier theatre company for Shakespeare. But of course not every production can be an unqualified success. I’m sorry to say that with this one they really have dropped the ball. It brings together the worlds of Messina and Lionel Messi. But the result is a mess.

Much Ado About Nothing is at the RSC in Stratford upon Avon until Saturday 24th May.