A Loving Labour, but with Its Potential Lost

Love’s Labour’s Lost
The National Arts Centre
The National Post

Marti Maraden, outgoing director of the National Arts Centre's English Theatre, has recruited an extraordinary number of our best actors, including at least four of my personal top 20, for her valedictory Shakespeare, Love's Labour's Lost. Unhappily, the whole doesn't amount to more than the sum of the parts, which means, by cruel theatrical arithmetic, that it adds up to less.

This early comedy, a word-drunk piece trying to get sober, is magical but tricky. As a pastoral it needs a sense of place, which isn't achieved here by a platform set built from anonymous timbers and a louring backcloth dotted with strange shapes, neither of which suggest parkland or much of anything else, except perhaps dead fish. John Pennoyer has also designed 18th-century costumes that are elaborate but, especially for the women, constricting.

The themes and relationships are accurately sketched in but not fleshed out for the most part. There is, tonally speaking, insufficient light and insufficient shade, and little of the speed with which one keeps giving place to the other. Juan Chioran comes off best as Don Armado, knight of the bedraggled countenance; the mournful Hispanic accent gives him, of course, no trouble, but it does sometimes seem to be taking over the characterization. Ben Carlson has all the pace, energy and intelligence for the jesting Berowne, and it's a pleasure to hear him phrase the big speeches; but he misses out on the sheer glee of self-mockery when he, too, falls in love.

There are also surprisingly few sparks between him and his dark lady Rosaline, played by Yanna McIntosh. Casting a black actress in this role sounds intriguing but works out awkwardly. When Berowne's friends cast aspersions on his lady's complexion, by which they textually mean just her hair and her eyes, they sound not merely rude but racist. It's especially perplexing since the arch-mocker (Nigel Shawn Williams as the King of Navarre) is himself black. Maybe some comment is being made on intra-racial prejudice, but I rather doubt it. Colour-blind casting and colour-specific casting seem here to have collided. Of course one wants to see McIntosh in Shakespeare, but I doubt if Rosaline, an underwritten joker, is her part, any more than Kelli Fox is a natural for the Princess of France, whom she plays with a charming but unvaried smile. I would like to see these two gifted actresses exchange roles.

The veteran David William makes a properly courtly, if excessively detached, Boyet; Peter Froehlich and David Schurmann make little of the pedants' cross-talk act but have nice moments, of confusion and rebuke respectively, in the concluding show of the Nine Worthies. The whole production, indeed, perks up in its last movement, which is the acme of bittersweet. The messenger of death makes his infallible effect, allowing Fox to play naked pain, which she does superbly, and McIntosh to administer an extra silent sting in the play's tail. And the song of the Owl and the Cuckoo has been beautifully set by Marc Desormeaux, with its verses cunningly distributed among the players. This, if nothing else, is a labour won.