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Love’s Labour’s Lost
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

More riches at Stratford: John Barton’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost is the season’s best so far (though his Merchant runs it close) -not so much a discovery of unknown riches as a clear demonstration that those in which we always believed do actually exist. Mr Barton directs it as a play about four undergraduates who forsake the world because they are afraid to face it,  as thrown by the arrival of young ladies, try to get the love-game together, are made ludicrous by the disclosure of their pretensions, try to put a good face on things, think they have succeeded and are defeated by the arrival of an unalterable reality, Death.

None of this, I am aware, is news, but I have never seen it lived so thoroughly before; never heard such delight taken I the scholars’ affectations, felt the mood change so palpably at the last, or known a Berowne keep so precise a balance between badinage and lyricism, sense and surrender, as Michael Pennington. (He starts as a disembodied intelligence, merely accomplished, and grows.) Backing him is a delightfully timid King from Richard Griffiths, as hesitant as he has in former roles been solid, and opposed is a Princess (Carmen du Sautoy in a spectacular ginger wig) who though she can teach him something of life, is visibly learning herself.

The finest tough of the evening cokes in the show of the Nine Worthies: one of the performing clowns lets his spear droop; the Princess comes forward to help him, and the King to help her; a three-way rapprochement. Allan Hendrick is a marvellously assured Costard, and there is a parkful of talent besides, the extremes of experience meeting in Michael Hordern’s Armado, who is rather like Quixote, and Jo James’s page, who is nothing at all like Sancho. There is a soothing arboreal set (most uncharacteristic of its designer Ralph Koltai) and action, mostly taking place on an oblong forestall gets closer to the audience than is usually believed, in this theatre, to be possible.