Peggy Ashcroft Holt in "Edward, My Son", in the West End and then on Broadway, and the downtrodden Catherine Sloper in "The Heiress" in 1949. Ashcroft began the 1950s with a return to Shakespeare, at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, playing Beatrice to Gielgud's Benedick in "Much Ado About Nothing" and Cordelia to his King Lear. In 1951 she returned to the Old Vic, playing Viola in "Twelfth Night", the title role in "Electra" and Mistress Page in "The Merry Wives of Windsor". In the second of these, according to Billington, "she scaled the austere peaks of Greek tragedy". Through the rest
Much Ado About Nothing the album is also a quotation from the play. The 2014 YouTube web series Nothing Much to Do is a modern retelling of the play, set in New Zealand. In 2015, Billie Joe Armstrong wrote the music for a rock opera adaptation of the play, "These Paper Bullets", which was written by Rolin Jones. In 2017, a YA adaptation was released by author Mckelle George called "Speak Easy, Speak Love", where the events of the play take place in the 1920s, focused around a failing speakeasy. In 2018, author Molly Booth released a summer YA novel adaptation called "Nothing Happened",