Freema Agyeman and Nick Blood will play Beatrice and Benedick in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of the romantic comedy Much Ado About Nothing at Stratford in April 2025.
Agyeman made her RSC debut as Olivia in Twelfth Night in 2024. In the same year, she played the nurse in Romeo and Juliet at London’s Duke of York Theatre. Blood will make his RSC debut. In 2022 he was in Dennis Kelly’s two-hander After The End at Stratford East.
Eleanor Worthington Coxwill play Hero. She was awarded the Olivier Award for best actress in a musical in 2012 for playing the title role in the RSC’s Matilda The Musical. Daniel Adeosunwill make his RSC debut as Claudio. He played Antipholus of Syracusein The Comedy of Errors at Shakespeare’s Globe in 2024, John Nevis in Trouble in Mind by Alice Childress at the National Theatre in 2021 and was one of the Hamlets in Steven Berkoff’s The Secret Love Life of Ophelia at Greenwich Theatre in 2020.
The rest of the cast comprises Azan Ahmed (Conrade), Gina Bramhill (Margaret), Nick Cavaliere (Verges), Flaminia Cinque (Sexton), Peter Forbes (Leonato), Tanya Franks (Antonia), Lydia Fraser (Ursula), Olivier Huband (Don Pedro), Megan Keaveny (ensemble), Nojan Khazai (Don John), Antonio Magro (Dogberry), Posi Morakinyo (Balthasar and Oatcake), Jay Taylor (Borachio) and Arthur Wilson (Seacole and the friar).
Director Michael Longhurst said, "I’m delighted to be tackling this play for my RSC directing debut with such an amazing company of actors—a premier league of talent indeed. It’s an incredibly exciting time to be directing for the RSC as part of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey’s second season.
“I’m thrilled that Freema Agyeman will continue her remarkable foray into Shakespeare’s canon, returning to Stratford to play Beatrice, and that the incredible Nick Blood joins her as Benedick. Like the standout talent from a football youth academy, Eleanor Worthington Cox steps back into the RSC rehearsal room to play Hero 13 years after her Olivier Award-winning performance as the eponymous role in Matilda The Musical.
“Much Ado About Nothing is about love: finding and accepting it. But its timeless investigation of masculinity and sex and gender power dynamics in a slander-fuelled plot felt ripe for exploration in the contemporary setting of top-flight football where WAGs and players-behaving-badly can enact a not-so-merry war.”
The creative team includes Jon Bausor (set and costume designer), Jack Knowles (lighting designer), Emma Laxton (sound designer), Julia Cheng (choreographer and movement director), Tal Rosner (video designer), Sara Green (intimacy director) and Anna Cooper CDG (casting director).
Much Ado About Nothing will run in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford from Saturday 12 April until Saturday 24 May.