Love's Labour's Lost

by William Shakespeare

seen in the gardens of Braboeuf Manor, Guildford on 25 July 2026

The Guildford Shakespeare Company and the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond have created joint open-air productions of both Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing for their summer seasons (quite usual for the GSC, but particularly apt for the Orange Tree, the auditorium for which is undergoing major renovations this summer). Tom Littler from the Orange Tree directs a cast of ten in the two plays, and he has devised ways to link them so that they appear to deal with the same characters before and after the Second World War. This is achieved by a few textual adjustments, but principally by assigning character names from each play to four couples and some assorted others. Thus the plays are linked more explicitly than in a similar exercise presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company eleven years ago (the RSC placed the plays on either side of the First World War and disposed the members of the cast differently).

In Love's Labour's Lost the four young male courtiers of the original are perfectly plausible as 1930's Oxbridge undergraduates (or perhaps they have recently graduated), their aspirations for living hopelessly out of touch with the world of real relationships and awkwardly insistent feelings. The visiting ladies soon scupper their idealistic fantasy of a three year retreat from feminine company, but the social comedy remains untouched almost until the end by the weightier matters of the real world. Even the lesser characters, decidedly from lower social strata, are ostensibly free from want or anxiety.

As in Much Ado (seen last week) James Sheldon gives a tremendously assured performance as Berowne/Benedick, a vital asset as these two characters (here presented as essentially the same person) must be convincing and charismatic for the plays to succeed as entertainment. The supporting cast manages the elaborate wordplay of Love's Labour's Lost with great panache, and often at dazzling speed, allowing us to be impressed by their mastery of the text rather than bamboozled by the now unfamiliar rhetorical wizardry.

The brittle make-believe world of the play is famously shattered in its concluding moments by the arrival of an unavoidably serious message for the Princess: the death of her father. The desperate and perhaps forlorn attempts of the young couples to retrieve something from this interruption by promises to revive their interest in one another after a suitable period of mourning, reflection and seeing to their new responsibilities is handled with due sobriety, and we the audience have some inkling that these four pairs of young people will have a "second chance" in the later Much Ado About Nothing.

The play ends with contrasting Spring and Winter songs concerning respectively the cuckoo and the owl. The text does not assign the songs to characters previously named; in this production Costard (here, an innkeeper) takes the lyrics for spring and Holofernes those for winter. At first they recited them, which had the curious effect of reminding me of reciting poetry in primary school classes, before they were repeated in song. I have seen productions in which the tunes for the two parts were utterly different, reflecting their different seasons, but here the same tune was used throughout. The overall effect was surprisingly poignant: the world of easy love-play was certainly giving way to something more serious.

Much Ado about Nothing

by William Shakespeare

seen in the gardens of Braboeuf Manor, Guildford on 18 July 2026

The Guildford Shakespeare Company and the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond have created joint open-air productions of both Love's Labour's Lost and Much Ado About Nothing for their summer seasons (quite usual for the GSC, but particularly apt for the Orange Tree, the auditorium for which is undergoing major renovations this summer). Tom Littler from the Orange Tree directs a cast of ten in the two plays, and he has devised ways to link them so that they appear to deal with the same characters before and after the Second World War. This is achieved by a few textual adjustments, but principally by assigning character names from each play to four couples and some assorted others. Thus the plays are linked more explicitly than in a similar exercise presented by the Royal Shakespeare Company eleven years ago (the RSC placed the plays on either side of the First World War and disposed the members of the cast differently).

By chance I have seen the "second" play first, and have thus watched the soldiers returning from the war, variously affected by its violence: Benedick Berowne suffers nightmares, while the affable Longeuville has become the treacherous John. But the linkings are a minor matter; the principal pleasure is to be gained from the excellence of the production of a fine play. Beatrice (Phoebe Pryce) and Benedick (James Sheldon) remain the dazzling sparring couple perfectly believable in the heady days of victory in the mid-1940s, while the plot to denigrate Hero (Joëlle Brabant) and humiliate Claudio (Chirag Benedict Lobo) unfolds around them in a milieu where mistrust could very easily develop due to the years-long parting of sweethearts. The comic village constabulary with the pompous Dogberry (Matt Pinches, doubling also as the villainous John) in charge are suitably re-imagined as members of the local home guard in a nod to Dad's Army.

In a corner of the extensive gardens of the former Guildford College of Law the setting was imagined to be a rural village pub festooned with victory bunting but apparently not much used during the war years. Great trees provided a magnificent backdrop and a vital sounding board, and also much needed shade for the actors in a matinee performance (the audience was less fortunate in this respect). Once again the GSC has provided a really enjoyable al fresco production of a Shakespeare play.

The Rivals

by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 8 December 2025

Tom Littler directs a revival of Sheridan's first really successful play to celebrate its 250th anniversary, re-setting it in the Wodehousian world of the 1920s, "about as modern as you can go," he says in a programme note, "before the plot makes no sense". (In any period it stretches the bounds of credulity, but that is partly its point.)

Kit Young plays Captain Jack Absolute, who has disguised himself as Sergeant Beverley to win the affections of Lydia Languish (Zoe Brough), a girl lost in dreams of romantic poverty inspired by reading sentimental novels. Their liaison has been discovered and forbidden by Lydia's aunt Mrs Malaprop (a wonderful Patricia Hodge, managing the lady's hilarious mangling of language with unerring dexterity). 

All very predictable, but the comedy intensifies when Mrs Malaprop and Jack's father Sir Anthony (Robert Bathurst) agree that Jack should marry Lydia (essentially for her fortune, so far as Sir Anthony is concerned). Jack at first refuses his father's overbearing pressure to marry under instruction, until he discovers who the intended bride is, and then he must juggle being Beverley and Jack to try to keep everyone happy, knowing that Lydia will not be impressed at being forced to marry a captain. Subplots abound, involving Lydia's cousin and Jack's friends, and Mrs Malaprop's clandestine flirtation via letters to the ludicrous Lucius O'Trigger (re-imagined as an American tycoon/"typhoon" rather than an Irish chancer).

The transition to the glamorous (and highly unrealistic) world of giddy young flappers bewildering their old-school elders works remarkably well, and the cast manage multiple scene changes in semi-darkness with consummate aplomb, blending the removal and replacement of furniture items with sophisticated dance-steps to bright 1920s-style music. The high level of energy and speed of delivery make for an invigorating and amusing evening, and the text, which could sound rather stilted if kept in its original 18th-century milieu, fizzed with the glitter of the play's updated setting.

Creditors

by August Strindberg adapted by Howard Brenton

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 16 September 2025

Tom Littler directs Charles Dance as Gustaf, Geraldine James as Tekla and Nicholas Farrell as Adolf in Strindberg's 1889 acute psychological drama about a strained marriage (Tekla's and Adolf's) and the disruptive influence of a third party.

In a set of aseptic creams and blues designed by Louie Whitemore representing a hotel at a Swedish sea-side resort Gustaf has befriended Adolf and persuaded him to shift from painting to sculpture to revive his flagging inspiration. Despite a short friendship - barely more than a week - they start to discuss Adolf's marriage. Gustaf's probing and apparently authoritative manner soon expose Adolf's insecurities while none-too-subtly denigrating the absent Tekla. Since Tekla had left her first husband to take up with Adolf there is fertile ground for undermining Adolf's confidence in her current fidelity. Clearly a man so easily persuaded to change the medium of his artistic expression is also suggestible in other areas of his life.

On Tekla's return Gustaf retreats to a room from where he can eavesdrop while husband and wife confront one another, moving rapidly from kittenish playfulness to lacerating criticism, and finally, in a surprising twist, Gustaf and Tekla cross swords. The play therefore is a series of dialogues; apart from a final brief tableau there are only ever two characters on stage at a time, and the intense encounters are thus tightly wound, sometimes resembling (to modern eyes and ears) informal therapy sessions made unhealthy by the ulterior motives of the participants.

One can see here the precursor to the styles and preoccupations of many subsequent dramatists: the veiled threat of insinuation so expertly wielded by Pinter; the backstory of long-simmering tensions precipitating a crisis often used by Eugene O'Neill; the unexpected twist forcing a late re-evaluation beloved by Edward Albee; even the barbs underlying social niceties which give some of Noel Coward's plays their unexpected bite amidst uneasy humour. In the hands of these three masterful actors the dynamics fizz and the acuity of Strindberg's dissection of an unsatisfactory marriage is brilliantly explored.

The drawcard of this particular cast - apart from their obvious expertise and long theatrical experience - is that the three actors have not been seen together since they appeared in the famed TV series The Jewel in the Crown more than forty years ago. However, such an extraneous frisson pales into insignificance once the performance starts: we are simply witnesses to an incisive theatrical experience.

Churchill in Moscow

by Howard Brenton

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 3 March 2025

Tom Littler directs Roger Allam as Churchill and Peter Forbes as Stalin, with Julius d'Silva as Molotov (Soviet Foreign Minister), Alan Cox as Archie Clark Kerr (British ambassador to the USSR), Tamara Greatrex as Svetlana Stalin, Jo Herbert as the British interpreter Sally Powell and Elisabeth Snegir as the Russian interpreter Olga Dovzhenko in Howard Brenton's play concerning the meeting Churchill had with Stalin in Moscow in August 1942. (The main characters are historical, but the two interpreters are fictional).

The principal reason for Churchill's journey was to inform Stalin personally that the Allies had decided that it was impossible to launch an invasion of western Europe immediately: it would have to wait until at least 1943 (in the event, the D-Day landings and the invasion of Italy did not take place until 1944). He felt that a face to face meeting was essential to deliver this bad news in good faith, rather than relying on telegrams or telephone calls. But it was of course a delicate matter, as the German invasion of the USSR had begun and the battle of Stalingrad actually began while Churchill was in Moscow.

Brenton makes good use of the interpreters he has chosen to invent. At the opening of the play Stalin speaks in Russian, requiring the audience to wait until Olga translates into English before understanding. In an inspired move, Churchill then speaks in complete gobbledygook, so that once again we must wait for Sally to interpret before we understand his response. This technique is used sparingly; most of the time English is spoken throughout, though the business of interpreting continues unobtrusively except when either Station or Churchill mistrusts what is being said or requires (or impatiently dismisses) immediate clarification. The interactions of the wider delegations are suggested b y the occasional presence of Molotov and Kerr, while the teenage Svetlana wanders around practising her English by reading David Copperfield until she is briefly introduced to Churchill during a late-night confab between the two leaders.

This was of course an extremely consequential meeting; the seriousness of the issues is always before us even as the outsize personalities of both the leaders dominate the stage. Wisely neither actor simply imitates the historical character. Roger Allam has something of Churchill's awkward gait and rhetorical flair, and his curious dress sense (for much of the time he is in a boiler suit, except for being in a nightshirt one evening and formal wear for the reception the next). Stalin, in his usual military style dress, speaks with a West Country accent, cleverly indicating the Georgian provincialism sneered at by the urban Russian elites.

The presence of the interpreters not only provides some comic relief arising from their tasks. They also have a brief interaction outside their official capacities injecting a slight nod to the anxieties and prejudices of the ordinary people enduring the war and the volatile political tensions surrounding them. And Brenton uses the idea of interpretation and the responsibility of the translating staff to be accurate - whether literally or thematically - as an intriguing emollient to the fractious and potentially disastrous rift which otherwise seems impossible to bridge. Despite their qualms, it seems that the interpreters saved the day.

A thoroughly enjoyable insight into what to many (myself included) is a little-known meeting.

Cancelling Socrates

by Howard Brenton

seen at the Jermyn Street Theatre on 11 June 2022

Tom Littler directs Jonathan Hyde as Socrates, Hannah Morrish as his wife Xanthippe (and also as a Daemon), Robert Mountford as his friend Euthyphro (and also as a Gaoler) and Sophie Ward as the hetaira Aspasia in Howard Brenton's new play Cancelling Socrates based on the four Platonic dialogues long published in the Penguin Classics series as The Last Days of Socrates.

The Jermyn Street Theatre is a small basement space underneath a restaurant, so the play is kept in an intimate form, the stage bare except for a fluted column, two pedestals for food offerings and a bench. The scene is amusingly set by having the sign pointing to the toilets in both Greek and English, and the formal announcements about starting times, switching off mobile phones and wearing facemasks given first in Greek and then in English translation (presumably modern rather than classical Greek). Indeed, when he first appears, the snippets of conversation involving Euthyphro, a young merchant who gives his name to the Platonic dialogue opening the sequence, come from invisible Greek speakers, though fortunately for us he answers in English.

Soon he meets Socrates, engagingly played as an eccentric with a powerful mind and a twitchy manner by Jonathan Hyde, Euthyphro soon being ambushed into a discussion about what constitutes justice and holiness, and whether the gods are just (particularly if different gods support different sides in a war, for example) before a conversation about their several reasons for attending the magistrates' court emerges. Euthyphro is, as usual, trapped by the Socratic line of questioning, but he is appalled at the flippancy with which Socrates seems to regard his own approaching case. 

Wisely the play does not directly present the Apology, Socrates's formal speeches to the court in which he defended himself against the accusation of sacrilege and corrupting the young, and then proposed an alternative to the death penalty voted by the jurors on his conviction (the defendant had the right to propose an alternative). There is no way the theatre could suggest a court hearing in which there were 501 jurors. Instead there is an extremely interesting and tense discussion between Aspasia and Xanthippe (a discussion that Plato would never have conceived of writing), the former appealing to politics and the state as the protectors of civic life, and the latter advancing the claims of family. Xanthippe has brought finely spun birds-nest pastries which she has made herself; Aspasia provides the new-fangled Egyptian delicacy she calls 'baklava' but scornfully dismisses any knowledge of how it is made, since a slave made it (that is what slaves are for). Irritatingly, Socrates, when he appears between his speeches, ignores his wife's cakes in favour of the exciting novelty of the pistachio-rich baklava. But Xanthippe knows her husband better than the worldly-wise Aspasia: she realises with horror that he will improvise his second speech rather than deliver the politic proposal prepared for him by Aspasia, and the result is disaster: the death penalty is upheld.

A cynical and down-to-earh gaoler presents the possibility that Socrates might simply escape from gaol rather than face the looming execution: as is cusomtanry for those with connections, the Gaoler has been bribed to let this happen. This covers the material in the short dialogue Crito but in a more comedic vein as the Gaoler's practical concerns (he needs th money for roof repairs at home) almost inure him to the restless Socratic pursuit of knowledge. The final scene of Socrates's life, depicted as an extended discussion of the afterlife among a host of friends in the Phaedo, is here presented in far more mundane fashion with only the Gaoler and Aspasia in attendace (Xanthippe having safely gone into exile with her sons), and the mysterious Daemon apparently present only to the great philosiopher's own consciousness.

The peculiarities of the Athenian court system and the weirdness of the position Socrates adopts - his apparent flippancy disguising a fearsome curiosity about deep philospohical questions - are brilliantly conveyed by the cast without stretching our patience or overloading us with too much informaton. At the same time there are some sly moments when the Athenian world and our own are shown to be not all that far apart: the trial takes place not long after a hideous plague beset the city, followed by a gruelling war (not that the UK is directly waging war at the moment, as Athens had been, but the point stands), and a waspish comment such as 'the young believe it's their absolute right not to be upset' drew wry chuckles from the mainly elderly audience.

These particular Platonic dialogues, among the most obviously dramatic of his works, have been finely brought to the stage in this excellent production.

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

seen at Trinity Church Guildford on 16 Febraury 2022

The Guildford Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet, performed in the Holy Trinity Church in the town's High Street, is directed by Tom Littler and features Freddie Fox in the title role with Noel White as Claudius, Karen Ascoe as Gertrude, Stefan Bednarczyk as Polonius, Daniel Burke as Laertes, Rosalind Ford as Ophelia, Pepter Lunkuse as Horatio, Sarah Gobran as Fortinbras and the members of the company doubling in other roles, with Edward Fox's voice as the Ghost of Hamlet's father.

Inevitably the text is cut to allow for just under three hours of performing time, and it is always interesting to see which of the ostensibly dispensable facets of the full text the director has chosen to retain. In this case director Tom Littler has made the politico-military sub-plot following the manouevres of Fortinbras one of the major threads of the production, while the extensive interactions of Hamlet with the players are necessarily truncated as only one player is present to give the vital Hecuba speech and there is no discussion of introducing new text to the Mouse Trap play. The dumb show of the Murder of Gonzago, imagined to be taking place in the real audience's space, is enough to scandalise Claudius. The abbreviations to the text, and the necessary culling of minor characters to enable the small supporting cast to double the parts, was intelligently managed.

The space and acoustics of the church provided an excellent environment for both the scenes at the court and the destabilising atmosphere on the battlements where the ghost 'appears'. With unostentatious modern dress the guards could deploy battery torches, the sharp white gleams piercing misty air as the characters tried desperately to pin down the apparition. Elsewhere pistols were in evidence - Hamlet shot Polonius at some distance - but rapiers were still essential for the final duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Though the gravedigger was digging a grave, it was only for an urn containing Ophelia's ashes.

Everything depends on Hamlet, and in Freddie Fox we had an engaging but troubled prince, taken to drink in his grief but soon shaking it off as he faces the challenge of revenge, and then by turns witty, sardonic, impassioned, and distraught, speaking the verse with a beguiling confidence and intelligence. The dynamic between Gertrude and Claudius seemed to be barely simmering in contrast to the prince's instinctive revulsion at his mother's actions, but the tensions in Polonius's family were nicely displayed in the scene of Laertes's departure, Polonius's sanctimony being given the added fillip of a clerical collar in a nod to the physical setting in a church. Ophelia's naive humanity was underscored by her facility in playing a cello, poignantly abandoned as she later descended into madness.

This was a stimulating production in an unusual but, as it turned out, entirely appropriate space.