REVIEW: Love’s Labour’s Lost – at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, March 14, 2015.

 

HEADING off to various theatres over the years there have been those productions you’re eager not to miss and others where you have taken your seat with considerable trepidation – times you wish you were somewhere else, but there have also been those times when you wish the show wouldn’t end.

On this occasion, looking forward lots to LLL, the optimism was totally justified and fully rewarded. This is a sheer delight, an emphatically engaging theatrical treat.

If only the two hours and 15 minutes could have stretched to three or even beyond, there would have been no complaints from this quarter. It was an absolute joy to be there.

Director Christopher Luscombe has made the clever move to shift Lost from northern Spain in the late 1500s to Edwardian times, just as the storm clouds of war gather over Europe in June 1914, and it has a particular resonance a century on regarding relationships that were forced to be put on hold and those loves that were sadly lost as nations clashed.

However, it’s far from doom and gloom until its closing and moving moments and having been heavily involved in Monty Python’s Spamalot in recent times it appears our director has been smitten, or maybe bitten, with the comedy bug.

He appears to have explored every nook and cranny of Lost to wring out the laughs. He may have taken a little bit of a liberty here and there with the Bard’s work but where there’s a ‘Will’ there’s a way, and Shakespeare himself might even feel the play’s all the better for it.

Not only are there cases of mistaken identities, there’s a bizarre musical pageant, a teddy bear threatened with a roof drop - somewhat a-la-Brideshead, a group of dancing Cossack soldiers and a rambling gardener, Costard, who would have been very much at home waiting at Fawlty Towers. It’s a conveyor belt of comedy capers!

Award-winning designer Simon Higlett’s set is a huge success too – based on a nearby stately Elizabethan manor - Charlecote House. Shakespeare himself used a Spanish country estate – but there does seem a link here with the English manor houses he would have known himself and this replica of Charlecote is an apt choice.

Higlett and the RSC’s scenic workshop team have provided a breathtaking joy to behold that uses almost every inch of the theatre’s huge thrust stage, with a few surprises rising up from the depths!

There’s also some wonderful music scored by Nigel Hess that fits the bill for this period in our history to perfection.

But it’s those treading the boards on whom everything rests and they deliver in abundance and style.

There’s a plethora of pleasing performances, several outstanding, and not only from the main characters in this battle of the sexes and witty repartee.

The clowning of Nick Haverson’s loveably scruffy Costard is first class, while the mannerisms and mangling of the English language provided by John Hodgkinson’s travelling Spaniard, Don Armado, is manically marvellous, and let’s not overlook the brilliantly bumbling old schoolmaster, Holofernes, played by David Horovitch.

Sparkling performances too from the four Lords and Ladies of the courts of Spain, and France, especially Edward Bennett’s bold and thought-provoking Berowne. As the Lords’ oaths to dedicate three years to study dissipate as swiftly as they were made there are several compelling gatherings and all manner of mirth inducing mix-ups with hints of Brideshead and Downton. It really is first class fare.

Lost is virtually sharing a double-bill with Love’s Labour’s Won, or rather Much Ado About Nothing as it is better known, until Spring next year. It seems the RSC takes the line that Much Ado is really Shakespeare’s ‘missing’ sequel to Lost.

The pairing straddles The Great War period and they are being played separately, or if you prefer you can enjoy a five-hour double bill on certain dates.

Having enjoyed this absolute cracker there’s an eagerness now for Much Ado – sorry.... that’s now LLW.