Glorious Monk-Eyeing
Love’s Labour’s Lost
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
Sometimes you can go home again. Michael Langham, director of the Stratford Festival for most of the 1960s, has returned to mount a new production of Love's Labour's Lost, the comedy with which he scored his most decisive early success at the festival and to which he has returned countless times since. He and the play are still fresh. This production, in which young actors from the Stratford Conservatory are bolstered by a few old reliables, is as magical as any version of the play I have seen -- or of any play, because, when Love's Labour's Lost is done well, it can seem like the best play ever written.
It's an early Shakespearean comedy that distills the essence of the form. One of the great Shakespearean themes is transience. Love's Labour's embodies it. It lulls its audience, as its characters are lulled, into believing that there is all the time in the world; and then shows, delicately but brutally, that there isn't. The situation -- there's hardly any plot -- is that the young King of Navarre and three of his attendant lords have taken a three- year pledge of monastic study, a vow they are immediately forced to break when the Princess of France -- with, naturally, three attendant ladies --arrives in the royal park on a diplomatic mission. Of course the four men fall in love with the four women. The latter are similarly interested but mock their wooers for making and then breaking their ascetic promises and, most of all, for the elaborate, fantastic ways in which they express themselves.
Basically, they want the men to grow up.
The play satirizes the artificial wordplay that was all the rage in the literature of the time, but it also indulges in it, gloriously. All this is knocked on the head when news of a royal death arrives from France. It's a thunderclap moment, one that prompts a re-evaluation of priorities and -- usually unthinkable in comedy -- a postponement of any possible marriage. "Our wooing," complains Berowne, the most articulate and self-aware of the lords, "doth not end like an old play" -- though even more startling, if we're talking self-awareness, is the earlier line in which, when the boom falls, he shoos the supporting comics from the stage: "Worthies away, the scene begins to cloud." He practically cues the lighting.
The production looks gorgeous. Anyone downcast at the rumoured loss of the familiar Festival Theatre can stroll along the riverside to the Tom Patterson, where Tanya Moiseiwitsch's once-permanent facade has been reconstructed in all its stepped and balconied glory. Its spare elegance is offset by Charlotte Dean's ravishing Cavalier costumes. The women in particular look wonderful. Together set and clothes provide the perfect ambience: burnished and bitter sweet.
This done, the greatest challenge and the most vital is to make the language entertaining and accessible. Some individual moments here might be better realized -- the great scene in which the young men progressively discover their shared perfidy falls short of its full, escalating impact -- but overall, Langham and his young cast do brilliantly. Every word tells. Ian Lake's Berowne is a verbal quick-change artist who can alter moods, as the play itself does, on a dime. He makes a great put-down specialist and his cunning, heart- stopping speech about the educational glories of love really is glorious. Shane Carty's King is a good shy foil, Jon de Leon's Dumaine breaks beautifully into song, and Alanna Hawley is a naturally commanding Princess. The courtiers' verbal excesses are echoed and expanded by their supposed inferiors ("they have been at a great feast of language and stolen the scraps"), with whom the older actors, and one a lot younger, have a field day. Peter Donaldson's Don Armado, the "fantastical Spaniard" -- proud, melancholy, noble and ridiculous -- is unlikely to have been bettered anywhere, certainly not in the magnanimity with which he acknowledges that the biblical Samson was on the whole better than he at carrying gates. And I flat refuse to believe that anyone has ever played his page Moth as charmingly, cheekily and skillfully as the phenomenal 11-year-old Abigail Winter-Culliford does it here. Their scenes, the most convoluted in the play, are fearlessly and flawlessly done, with Brian Tree, knowing and weathered as Costard the clown, expanding the duets into a triumphant trio.
More conventional but sufficient are John Vickery's booming schoolmaster and Gareth Potter's timid curate, who's almost hidden in his costume and makeup but does get to illustrate Costard's description of him as "a marvellous good bowler." Back on the courtly fringes, Steven Sutcliffe's Boyet is a delightful go-between, and Gordon S. Miller creates a whole character out of a star-struck forester's three-line attempt at flattering the Princess, a sign of the care the production takes and the rewards it reaps. This, with Hamlet, makes two great Shakespeare productions in one opening week.