Love’s Labour’s Lost
Coronation Park
The National Post

I doubt if there is a more beautiful setting for drama, anywhere, than the outdoor theatre in Oakville's Coronation Park.

The stage itself is compact and tree-laden; behind it in the middle distance, clearly visible (and audible) is Lake Ontario. Pedestrians and cyclists, glimpsed in the space between, look like part of the action, given that the play itself is likely to be pastoral and the dress modern.

At most open-air shows you wait till half-time, when darkness falls, for magic to descend. In Oakville it's there from the start, though it's certainly augmented in the second act.

And when the play is Love's Labour's Lost, whose comic climax is the most bewitching ever fashioned by Shakespeare or anyone else, we're in velvet.

It's tempting to call it a tragi-comic climax. Four young men -- the King of Navarre and three of his friends -- have spent the bulk of the play wooing four young ladies -- the Princess of France and three of her attendants. There have been plenty of misunderstandings, but all seems set fair for a happy ending. Then news arrives that the princess' father has died, and the sequel is the most abrupt and astonishing gear-change in the whole of Shakespeare. Some of the local inhabitants have been amusing the courtiers with a farcical pageant of the “Nine Worthies”.

Berowne, most articulate of the King's buddies and the key character of the play, turns on them to underline the moment with audacious explicitness: "Worthies away, the scene begins to cloud." The women tell their suitors to put their passions on ice for 12 months; the men reluctantly agree, though, as Berowne pointedly observes, a year's delay is "too long for a play."

As usual, the women are far more sensible than the men. The king has begun the play by dedicating himself and his circle to three years of study, fasting and celibacy, a vow immediately threatened by the arrival of the princess on a diplomatic mission. Behind the initial folly lies a deeper one.

The play, one of Shakespeare's earliest, both derives from and depicts a society drunk with words; it joins in the verbal game, with great relish, and ends by rejecting it.

Even when they fall in love, the men can't stop playing; that is the women's chief quarrel with them. Berowne, the most clear- sighted of them all and also the jokiest, is condemned by his love, Rosaline, to spend his year's probation entertaining the incurably sick.

Michael Shamata's production, consistently intelligent and inventive, captures a generous proportion of the play's wit, extravagance and sudden sadness. John Jarvis is a masterful Berowne; he handles his great speech of aghast self-revelation ("and I, forsooth, in love") with a drive and control that suggests he might play the great swashbuckling roles (Hotspur, Mercutio, Edmund) that seem to reduce most contemporary actors to dismayed disgust.

He also has one of the archetypal comic scenes; concealed in a tree -- this setting delightfully affords him a real, solid willow - - he smugly surveys each of his associates betraying their vows ("Like a demigod, here sit I in the sky"), before taking the heaviest and most humiliating tumble himself; as a study of too- smart complacency betrayed by passion, he deliciously foreshadows Frasier Crane.

Patrick Galligan makes a charmingly earnest King; Ann Baggley's princess doesn't get much beyond gracious forbearance, but Gina Wilkinson is a striking Rosaline, though she sometimes acts like somebody who has just discovered irony and can't wait to tell you about it.

The other characters who stroll through the royal park of Navarre are Elizabethan types whom this production, without any twisting, makes remarkably recognizable. They, too, are verbally obsessed.

John Blackwood's Don Armado, emphatically Hispanic, is a threadbare adventurer with the nobility of Quixote and the facial hair of Salvador Dali; his page, Moth (Stephen Smith), has the precocious fluency that presumably characterized the child actors of Shakespeare's own day. The schoolmaster Holofernes is marvellously well done by Robert Persichini: riding a bike, sporting a striped cap, dispensing useless learning with an unhurried pomp that arouses the timid local curate (Philip Riccio) to endearing ecstasies of sycophantic admiration.

Some hair's breadth doubling allows two of the courtiers (Shaun Benson, Sandra Forsell) to appear also, and more happily, among rustics; she makes a delightfully blowsy wench. As the clown Costard, the play's natural man, Christopher Morris is vigorous if not especially funny. They all appear to great effect among the “Worthies”: a scene that's subtler than the parallel charade in A Midsummer Night's Dream because its long-suffering performers are given far more chance to fight back against the carping courtiers. They help take our minds off the mortality and mutability of which the play then so bracingly and movingly reminds us. There are seeds in this play of Shakespeare's later, better-known comedies, though on some things on which he never improved.