Tom Hiddleston takes his shirt off

Yes, in a Shakespeare play. In London!

It is one hell of a moment. Delivering what I think (in gym terms) is known as a low lunge, with one straight leg, one knee millimetres from the ground, and the other at 90 degrees, Hiddleston unbuttons the top two fastenings of his formal dress shirt.

Cries go out from the audience. He then gracefully stands up, with his back to the audience. We cannot see but he is unbuttoning his shirt. Then, he turns to fully face the auditorium. I probably should say that he is speaking blank verse throughout.

The shirt is fully open, revealing a sculpted stomach and torso one only thought existed in Mr Universe competitions, or on Action Man dolls. Cue general hysteria from over 2,100 people on all four tiers, including boxes, of the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane.

What did you say? Take my shirt off?

Welcome to Much Ado About Nothing, the Millennial version.

It is such fun! That’s the first thing. One walks into the beautiful gilded auditorium to encounter grooving ushers dancing around waving signs saying “Turn Your Phones Off”, in time to Nineties pop anthems.

Outside, huge posters have Tom Hiddleston’s name above that of Shakespeare. But of course. Thanks to his recurring role as Marvel’s naughty trickster Loki, Hiddleston is a fully fledged Hollywood star. Yes, I know he cut his teeth at RADA and played Coriolanus at the National Theatre. But THIS IS LOKI. Transported in some miraculous way to Benedick, in Much Ado About Nothing and what’s more, taking his shirt off eight times a week in central London.

The rest of the cast are no mean assemblage; his sparring partner Beatrice is played by another Marvel personality, Hayley Atwell. Stage stalwarts such as Forbes Masson, a pitch perfect Leonato, Gerald Kyd and the wonderful Tim Steed all ensure this is a company show, sort of. That is if you discount the viewpoint of the entire audience, which is at Drury Lane for one reason and one reason only. LOKI.

I include myself in this. My youngest son, now 20, and I are serious Marvel fans. We’ve seen ‘em all, usually on the first weekend possible. Iron Man (various versions), Thor (ditto), Ant Man, etc. We’ve cried at Avengers Infinity War, cheered at Stan Lee’s cameos, bigged up Spiderman. We’ve watched the TV spinoffs. We always stay for the minute after the credits roll (where the next Marvel film is promoted, usually with some huge personage playing a baddie such as Samuel L Jackson, or Robert Redford). We have even kept going to the films when they went off the boil.

Naturally, we were going to see Hiddleston in Shakespeare. Naturally, Lucien had no idea what Much Ado About Nothing was. If a young person hasn’t done a ‘Spear for an exam, they don’t know it.

Just think of this poster, I usefully told him on the way to the theatre. See below.

On arrival at the theatre, I knew we were in the grip of a ‘moment’. “It’s a great show!” said the lady checking our tickets. “It’s had great reviews.” Ah, Madam, that is where you are wrong. It hasn’t had any reviews, in the formal sense. It hasn’t had a press night. It doesn’t need one.

Unlike Jamie Lloyd’s previous “Shakespeare-at-Drury-Lane-with-a-Hollywood-name”, namely The Tempest with Sigourney Weaver as Prospero, this show has confidence. It has buoyancy. It has HUGE hit written all over it, with or without the reviews.

And lo, the curtain rises. Zero set. Loads of cherry blossom everywhere. Will there be applause when Hiddleston arrives? Are you completely bonkers? The whole audience goes insane. I am probably the oldest person in the house, and that is the point. I have honestly never seen a younger, more diverse, more focused crowd at a Shakespeare production in the West End. And possibly a more excited one. They are here to have a good time. We are all here to have a good time. Every time Hiddleston opens his mouth, cheers. Every time he winks at the audience, whoops. Every time he points at an excited person in the stalls, said person faints.

Lloyd understands his audience. There are disco bangers (Groovers in the House is one) throughout this show. Every time, the whole cast start dancing, rather brilliantly. Hiddleston, throwing shapes! Who knew? There is even a moment of pure meta-theatricals where lifesize, cardboard cutouts of Atwell and Hiddleston’s Marvel characters are used as props. An actual image of Loki, in a Shakespeare play. The actress playing Hero, holding the cutout, points to his groin. The audience cheers wildly. It’s a cutout, everyone!

Characters in the play who do not really push forward the action, such as the unfunny Dogberry, have simply been excised by Lloyd. Interestingly, there is a whole section in the programme devoted towards clowning, in particular about the Elizabethan actor who played Dogberry in the original production, which makes me think this was perhaps a last minute decision. It’s a good one, however. The play spins along with no longeurs. We are in the hands of professionals.

Two observations; as the cast took its bow, and invited the whole audience to join in with disco moves, which it did without a second’s hesitation, my son said to me “That was great! It was so easy to understand!”

Secondly, as we left the theatre there was a queue of monumental proportions snaking around outside the building. This was the queue for the Stage Door.

I have been looking (again) at Culture Is Bad For You, by Brook, O’Brien and Taylor. This book crunches a lot of data to analyse who is going to British culture and why it is so unequal, both in terms of employees and in terms of audiences.

One of the main points it raises is that cultural consumption in the UK is a minority event. That there is “a disconnection between cultural production, cultural consumption and whole swathes of the population.”

The Jamie Lloyd project at the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane does not knock this idea down, but disregards it. The production is an outlier. It is a triumphant, and reasonably (but not wildly) expensive, delivery of ‘high’ art via popular culture to an audience who don’t normally feel included in the art world. Yes, we are lucky to have a player as Hiddleston, who can do both popular and rarified (while taking his shirt off), but it is a simple formula which producers across the theatre landscape, particularly ones which use public money, ought to take note of.

What a night!