Love’s Labour’s Lost
1985: Elijah Moshinsky

The BBC Shakespeare Plays version of Love’s Labour’s Lost is an outlier in the whole series, in that it is one of the few that is explicitly set at some other time. Most of the comedies are rendered in Elizabethan dress or something rather more generalized; this, by contrast, is decked out in Age of Reason costume and settings, with powdered wigs and fussy Scientific-Revolution props suitable to the Philosophe, which was, I think, the conceit behind the decision. The brief philosophical isolation of the four gentlemen of Navarre recalls the same notion in Marivaux’s Triumph of Love. The background music, as well, is suitable to the same period, and the songs are mid-classical in style, like late Mozart, Haydn, or early Schubert. While this kind of time-and-place transference works far less reliably in the histories, here it is effective; the Rococo mannerisms answer the fussy delicacy of the verse and the verbal sparring in the play.

Beneath the surface, though, the performance is extremely solid throughout, and the players are all in good form. Mike Gwilym and Jenny Agutter (Berowne and Rosaline) deliver a crackling banter that recalls the sparring of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado about Nothing, but more mannered and not quite as consequential. Gwilym played several other roles in the BBC Plays series and here captures the role quite brilliantly; Agutter, known from such things as Logan's Run and an early production of The Railway Children, matches him phrase for phrase and gesture for gesture. Maureen Lipman (who has had a long and storied career) brings a genuinely royal presence to the role of the Princess, while David Warner plays the buffoon Don Armado with as much absurdity as one typically sees, but with more warmth.

I a generally favorably inclined toward the productions of the BBC series, but this is decidedly one of the better, and for reasons I did not entirely expect ahead of time. It may encourage one to rethink the play at least somewhat. That in itself is perhaps something of an achievement.

Buy the complete BBC Shakespeare Plays at Amazon. Note that this will require a Region 2 player or a region-free player: it will not play on most normal American DVD players. Nevertheless, the price is so reasonable that even with a region-free player thrown into the deal, you’ll come out ahead.

Buy the complete set of the BBC Shakespeare Plays or individual plays (including this one) in Region 1 format direct from Ambrose Video.