My daughter and I had ringside seats for Petersfield Shakespeare Festival’s latest outdoor production, a witty and inventive re-imagining of Much Ado About Nothing in post-war Sicily. Our neighbour, like us lounging on rugs thoughtfully-provided by the production team, was an actress whose boyfriend is starring in the same play coincidentally running at London’s Globe theatre. She’d been to both, and this for her was an even better experience than the Southbank show. 

You could see why. This had all the hallmarks of a PSF production: intelligent scripting and direction, deceptively simple set design, pace and energy and above all a cast of fine comic actors working selflessly for each other.  

Their sense of fun was infectious. David McCarthy channelled Chico Marx as bumbling police constable Dogberry. Beatrice, played by the versatile Amy Allen, got the biggest laughs of the night from children in the audience while attempting to disguise her tall frame while eavesdropping. Her counterpart Benedick, the impressive Jon-Paul Rowden, was even funnier in his role as a confirmed bachelor bowing to the inevitable.   

Both actors along with most of the cast were reunited after last year’s PSF production of Midsummer Night’s Dream. Audiences still talk about the full orange moon that rose as if on cue, heightening the hallucinogenic power of that magical performance. 

This year, festival venue Wyld’s Farm came through with the special effects yet again, a brooding rainstorm during Friday evening’s performance breaking just as the carefree partying and mischief making in Much Ado About Nothing takes a darker turn. It quickly passed, thankfully for those of us out on the grass, but it helped punctuate the action as did the clever use of a jukebox playing 50s hits which the players fired up to set the mood between scenes.  

I enjoyed the poised comic performances of Joy Brook as Leonata and Harriet Benson as Ursula. They even manage to keep a straight face when the excellent Crispin Glancy and Albert de Jongh – Claudio and the prince Don Pedro – rage impotently at them as ‘toothless old women’, their evident sophisticated glamour underlining which way the pendulum had swung in this battle of the sexes.  

Another brilliant show from producers Lucy Hollis and Clare Glancy, director Chris Hollis and their Petersfield Shakespeare Festival team, who are making a name for themselves far beyond this lovely corner of Hampshire.