[In the following review, Young declares he was completely won over by the Royal Shakespeare Company's 2002 production of Much Ado about Nothing, set in Mussolini's Italy.]

During the interval of Much Ado About Nothing, the RSC's summer block-buster, I sidled up to Ned Sherrin in the bar and started peppering him with questions. Why does Don John hate his brother? What's the back story? And how does Don John hope to get his revenge on his brother by sabotaging the marriage of Hero and Claudio?

“I know your game,” said the presenter of Loose Ends. “You want to find out how it ends so you can leave without having to sit through the second half.”

If he'd said this to me at either of the other plays I saw last week he would have been right, but in this case he was wrong. At the beginning of the evening I was prepared for the worst, having sat through eight other RSC productions in the past year, but by the time the interval rolled around I was completely won over. Much Ado About Nothing is the best Shakespeare production I've seen since taking over this column.

Set in Italy under Mussolini, it's an unapologetic crowd-pleaser, with plenty of song-and-dance routines, a beautiful heroine in the form of Kirsten Parker and two scorching central performances by Harriet Walter and Nicholas Le Prevost. Le Prevost is particularly good as Benedick, whom he plays as an irascible old drunk who's rescued by the love of a good woman. The scene in which he challenges Claudio to a duel, having been put up to it by Beatrice, is absolutely spellbinding. Claudio and his patron, Don Pedro, can hardly believe it when their old sidekick, a buffoon who's used to singing for his supper, unexpectedly lays down the gauntlet. Can this be the same Benedick who usually trots at their heels like a trained poodle? Le Prevost appears to grow before your eyes until he towers above his former masters, terrifying them out of their codpieces. It's heart-stopping stuff.