love’s labour’s lost
The stratford festival
the national post

The new Stratford production of Love's Labour's Lost begins, brilliantly, with Mike Shara arriving late. Shara is playing Berowne, one of the three young lords who, in this great early Shakespeare comedy, sign up for the King of Navarre's program of turning his court into a model university, a "little academe." He is also the most skeptical about its chances of success, given that the proposed academy strongly resembles a monastery with strict prohibitions concerning eating, sleeping and - above all - contact with women. Berowne himself obviously likes to sleep in, which is why he's still plonking down his suitcase while his fellows, having made a ceremonial entrance, are already taking their vows. Berowne is both a realist and a compulsive joker. It's he who reminds the king that the no-woman rule will have to be broken, immediately, as the Princess of France is about to arrive on a diplomatic mission. She has three attendant ladies, and of course the four men fall in love with the four women. They send extravagant love letters, mostly in verse, which the ladies, though fundamentally favourably disposed, find ludicrous. To a large extent, this is a play about words, and like Berowne himself, it both mocks and revels in them. John Caird, a first division British director making his Stratford debut, builds his production around them. The wit-combats, often involving multiple players, are elaborately orchestrated, and elaborately choreographed as well. There's an action to suit every word.

Berowne has two great speeches, both about love. In the first he confesses that he, the cynic, has turned out the most hopeless of romantics, while remaining cynical even about that. Shara bounds about the stage, in an ecstasy of self-mocking self flagellation. The second, undertaken to save the faces of himself and his forsworn friends, is a long lyrical aria in praise of love and of women; and this he delivers with a stillness, a concentration and a command, all the more compelling for their contrast with the hyper-activity that both follows and precedes them. It's a vindication of the Festival stage as an unrivalled launching-pad for language, and of the actor who, after innumerable and usually very funny successes in supporting roles, finally has a governing role and triumphs in it. Of his fellow students, Sanjay Talwar is an engagingly indecisive king while Andrew Robinson, a supercilious Longaville, and Thomas Olajide, an acrobatic Dumaine, make individuals out of roles that are usually blanks. The women however, who are meant to be the repositories of sense and reason, largely fall down on the job; Ruby Joy is a graceful princess but she could use some lower notes in both her voice and her personality.

The young aristocrats are surrounded by humbler, and mostly older, folk, similarly word-drunk. Prince among them is Don Adriano de Armado, the fantastical (and dead broke) Spaniard, whom Juan Chioran endows with moustachios spectacularly flared and with a bizarre dignity of soul. His diminutive page Moth is played by young Gabriel Long with remarkable fluency, verbal and on occasion musical, though the production's use of the latter element sometimes gets out of hand. Josue Labourcane is a find as the clown Costard and, as the country wench whose favours he shares with the Don, Jennifer Mogbock is a carnal delight. Then there are the pedants, the professional word merchants;

Tom Rooney is an unusual schoolmaster Holofernes, more robust and sensual than the average and also more humane, while Brian Tree, who must by now have played every rustic role in this play, flutters sententiously around him as the curate Sir Nathaniel. He then becomes touching in his role as Alexander the Great in the last act pageant of the Nine Worthies, trying uncomfortably to look martial on a hobby-horse. This whole interlude is spectacularly staged, with lots of props, though I wondered, not for the first time, how these well-meaning amateurs could have managed, at about a half-hour's notice, to get it all together.

The play proper is prettily set and costumed, Cavalier-style, by Patrick Clark, and beautifully lit by Michael Walton. For all that, it's less seductive, less funny, and less verbally adroit than Michael Langham's swan-song production of seven years ago. It's fussier, and it's also less moving. What makes this play a masterpiece is its unique bittersweet conclusion. Some 10 minutes from the final curtain, all seems set for a happy ending; the ladies have forgiven the gentlemen their foolishness, the Jacks have won their Jills. Then, out of nowhere, a messenger appears. The princess's father is dead; games, romantic or verbal, must be set aside. Besides, the fact of death makes the women aware that the men still have some maturing to do. They're told to smarten up, sober up, devote themselves to good works for a year and a day, then report back. Here, the shock is muted. We can see the messenger coming (he enters down the auditorium steps) and there hasn't been enough rapport between the lovers for their separation to mean much. The final song of the Owl and the Cuckoo, all plain words and sweet music, helps out, as it always does, but the magic has gone. No other play ends like this, and the play knows it: "Come, sir, it wants a 12-month and a day. And then 'twill end." "That's too long for a play."