Matthew Dunster’s revival of Much Ado, which transfers the action from Messina in the 16th century to Monterrey during the chaotic early-20th-century Mexican Revolution, is a smart (and fresh) departure with a number of ideas in play, but ultimately they can’t stand up for themselves.

The most obvious problem is gender. There’s nothing wrong with the now seemingly mandatory handful of Globe sex changes – in this case, the elderly Antonio and villain-in-chief Don John – until they start making a nonsense of assorted lines, character traits and bits of business. The odd word out of place can be hurriedly tweaked (and such tweaks would be inconspicuous in a version such as this which insists on rewriting every halfway difficult word), but martial behaviour seems out of place, notwithstanding the reality of women’s involvement in the Mexican conflict. Too often this feels like an attempt to create Lorca-like strong women but sticking them in a characteristically male context where they asphyxiate.

In fact, the principal instance of this problem is Beatrice, one of the twin protagonists of Shakespeare’s “merry war”... for it’s time to remember that this is a comedy. Beatriz Romilly’s Beatrice is as strident as if Kate the shrew had wandered into the wrong play. With no apparent reason why Benedick should have fallen in love with her in the past or be tricked into it again now, it takes all of Matthew Needham’s humorous skills to keep the romantic missile on trajectory; fortunately, he is up to the task.

Dunster’s vision acquires a momentum of its own after the interval, when the other romance – that of Claudio and Hero – is sabotaged, but even then things keep popping up to torpedo it. The idea of turning the low-comedy characters of the Watch into an American newsreel crew is both historically grounded and potentially fertile, but when it entails both explaining Shakespeare’s malapropism gags and then paradoxically inserting a wheelbarrowload more, and the most atrocious attempted American accent I’ve ever heard (if there’s a point to Ewan Waldrop’s manglings, it escapes me), it... look, to be honest, by now I’m running out of metaphors for “doesn’t work”. I can see where it’s all trying to go, but I’m afraid it arrives neither there nor at any more conventional Shakespearean destination.

Written for the Financial Times.