Love’s Labour’s Lost
2015: Robin Lough

This is the recent Royal Shakespeare Company version of the play, and it holds up quite well. It is fairly complete, and quite well-acted, and supports the part of the play that still has some real depth. Unlike the Branagh version, which is set in 1939, this is set in 1914. Clearly it is important for everything to be on the brink of war. This kind of movement into another time and place does not really trouble the comedies as much as the histories, I would argue, and in general, this works quite well.

There is a certain similarity in the aesthetic of this production and the Branagh version of fifteen years earlier: there's a lot of empahsis on color variation and highly symmetrical stage blocking. None of that is particularly unwelcome.

Edward Bennett as Berowne and Michelle Terry as Rosaline maintain their barbed banter much as they do as Beatrice and Benedick in the Much Ado About Nothing presented as a sequel to this (billed, unaccountably, as Love’s Labour’s Won); I find Terry’s delivery typically somewhat too monochromatically acidic at the beginning of the play, though here she is not, to my taste, as harsh and hard to listen to as she is in some of Dominic Dromgoole’s Globe productions. (She has the role of the Princess of France in his 2011 Love’s Labour’s Lost.) She redeems the whole performance, for my money, at the end with her final speeches to Berowne, which stand all the silliness in the play on its head. I’m a little less satisfied with the very ending, at which the four gentlemen of Navarre are apparently sent off to war — which makes sense of the 1914 setting, but nonsense out of Shakespeare’s script.

There are some troubling inconsistencies like this, and there is some gratuitously ridiculous stage business revolving around a teddy bear, and some more than is really needed about Hercules and the snake, but Lough and his crew take the dive from farce into the relatively dark ending of the play seriously (if somewhat confusedly) and pull it off with gravity and nuance. For a relatively complete version of the play not overly encumbered with high concept, this is definitely worth seeing, though with the understanding that the staging is clearly not Elizabethan.

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