Tom Hiddleston's Much Ado About Nothing is glorious - but £275 a ticket is absurd

What a difference two calendar months can make. On 18 December, Jamie Lloyd’s production of The Tempest, starring Sigourney Weaver, opened at London’s swankiest theatre, the Theatre Royal Drury Lane, to almost universal derision. Last night, Lloyd premiered his take on Shakespeare’s sparkiest comedy, with Hayley Atwell and Tom Hiddleston as the warring once and future lovers Beatrice and Benedick. The plaudits for this show will continue to echo long after its too-short run has concluded.

Unlike poor Weaver, who was all at sea with The Tempest’s verse, Atwell and Hiddleston actively revel in its challenges and delights, instantly conjuring a spiky rapport. The verbal jousting between Beatrice and Benedick comes in some of the most delightful scenes in all of Shakespeare and these two fine performers savour the chance to make their mark. If the Emma Thompson/Kenneth Branagh film pairing represents the gold standard for this play, Atwell and Hiddleston run them very close.

Lloyd’s setting is a modern-day club, which means glad rags costumes, lots of energetic dancing – Hiddleston throws some mean shapes on the dance floor – and bucketloads of pink confetti billowing down throughout. The playfulness is to be celebrated – the cast engages in much enthusiastic running about, unlike in The Tempest when they appeared to be actively afraid of a good 85 per cent of the playing area – yet it doesn’t anchor the play in any meaningful way. Thus the nuances of too many characters are lost – Don John becomes a pantomime villain in a flouncy scarf – and such contemporary revelry and abandon makes the plot fulcrum of Hero’s (Mara Huf) disputed virginity seem highly improbable.

Gradually, however, the magnificence of Atwell and Hiddleston means that any lingering doubts melt away. They are both highly adept at playing to the audience, drawing spectators into a sense of complicity, which is no mean feat in this grandiose 2,000-seat theatre. Atwell beautifully suggests a heart heavy with hurt and loneliness under Beatrice’s witty and worldly demeanour, whereas Hiddleston is such a warm, open and intelligent performer that we cannot help but root for Benedick to stop mucking about and to declare his love properly. Their aerobic vigour in the dance scenes is impressive to behold.

Alongside its myriad blessings, Much Ado is also burdened with some of the most tedious “comic” scenes that Shakespeare ever committed to parchment and Lloyd deals with this problem with clinical efficiency: he simply excises Dogberry and his bumbling policemen entirely. This sensible streamlining means the pace never slackens and the whole evening is done in a nifty two-and-a-quarter hours, including the interval.

This is a hugely classy offering and the prices are, unsurprisingly, eye-wateringly high. The stalls seat I had goes for an incredible £275, yet I struggled to see quite a bit of stage business. Producers do need to bear in mind that, for this sort of money, the experience they are giving audiences needs to be one of star quality both on and off the stage.

To 5 April (020 3925 2998, Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London (lwtheatres.co.uk)