Love's Labour's Lost

by William Shakespeare

seen by live streaming from the RSC on 11 February 2015

This production directed by Christopher Luscombe features Edward Bennett as Berowne and Michelle Terry as Rosaline. It is set in the summer of 1914 ostensibly at Charlecote, the Elizabethan manor house near Stratford on Avon (in whose park the boy William is reputed by some to have poached deer).

Details of the manor house have been used and adapted to provide a library and a drawing room as interiors, and a gatehouse and roofscape, as well as indication of the park, as exteriors. The stage design, by Simon Higlett, is inventive and bewitching. Music by Nigel Hess evokes the style of Elgar and the often melancholy tone of folksong to brilliant effect.

The date of the setting is apt as the play closes on a sombre note with the announcement of the death of the king of France, which immediately brings to a halt the comic festivities of the Pageant of Nine Worthies. The delay of a year's reflection enjoined on the four young men by the princess (now queen) of France is transferred poignantly into a premonition of the impending war when the four make their final appearance in uniform and a quiet but insistent drumbeat marches them off.

Prior to this all is high energy and delight as vows are made and almost immediately broken, subterfuges are attempted by the men and wittily turned and exposed by the ladies, while the ridiculously pompous Spaniard Don Armado (John Hodgkinson) spars with a sprightly and sweet-voiced servant boy Moth (Peter McGovern), and the local worthies show off Shakespeare's brilliant use of language to characterise comic types. Edward Bennett brings a moving depth to Berowne's rhetorical excesses and is well matched by Michelle Terry's scornful but scintillating Rosaline. The scene in which each of the four young men reveals his failure to resist love, unaware of the presence of the previous confessors, takes place on a roof terrace in moonlight which arises seemingly from nowhere on the thrust stage, a quite inspiring piece of stagecraft as well as a perfect setting for justifying a complete reversal of purpose.

The production is being presented in tandem with a play called 'Love's Labour's Won', which is better known as 'Much Ado About Nothing'. This is set just after the First World War, but in the same physical environment, and with many of the same actors taking part: a fascinating juxtaposition.