Theatre review: Love's Labour's Lost(Sam Wanamaker Playhouse)

It's great to see Jade Williams back at the Globe, even if it is indoors in the Swanamaker so there's no groundlings for her to vomit on. She and Dharmesh Patel pair up to play Rosaline and Berowne, the proto-Beatrice and Benedick who appear as one of the central three romantic couples in Love's Labour's Lost. That's right, three; Nick Bagnall's production, although not, to my knowledge, touring, has the kind of cast-size you'd expect of a "tiny" touring production, with eight actors covering all the roles. A cerain amount of editing is needed to make that work, and in this case Longueville and Maria have been edited right out of the play altogether. What's left is the story of the King of Navarre (Paul Stocker,) who talks his friends Berowne and Dumaine (Tom Kanji) into joining him in a puritanically strict three-year course of study that includes swearing off the company of women.

This being a romantic comedy, the vow is tested immediately when the Princess of France (Kirsty Woodward) arrives on a diplomatic mission and the King falls for her, as do Berowne and Dumaine for her companions Rosaline and Katherine (Leaphia Darko.)

Never has what happens next felt quite as random and weird as it does here. Love's Labour's Lost isn't one of the best-loved or more frequently produced comedies, its reputation being mainly as a very wordy play - heavy on the verse, pretty relentless on the rhyming couplets (in fact this is part of what I found impressive about the text edit, it can't be easy to keep rhyme and scansion while eliminating whole characters and their plotlines.) It's probably fair to say Bagnall hasn't relied on the witty wordplay to provide the comedy all on its own, and has ramped up the comic business and silliness.

A lot of this is down to the small cast - there is, naturally, a lot of doubling of roles to be done (with the character of Costard even having to swap actors from Kanji to Patel at one point because the former's busy elsewhere.) But losing one pair of lovers also gives those left a chance to breathe and become distinct from each other - in the male trio Stocker's King is the impulsive one, Patel's Berowne the dry wit and Kanji's Dumaine the nice-but-dim one, while among the visiting ladies Woodward is a nerdy, ungainly Princess, Williams' Rosaline the heart and brains of the operation, and Katherine... kind of sits in the background.

If silliness is the production's key feature, one character takes that to new heights; I wouldn't have thought anyone could look at the play's bizarre Spanish stereotype Don Armado and think "well, this character needs to be weirder" but here we are, as Jos Vantyler performs the majority of his scenes alone, playing both Armado and his young page Moth. It's an oddity that finally makes sense when it turns out to have been setup for the production's biggest showstopper as Vantyler duets with himself on "To All The Girls I've Loved Before."

It's an opportunity to flirt outrageously with the audience, and if the candlelit confines of the Swanamaker look a bit more dainty and refined than the Globe itself it's not something the cast (completed by Charlotte Mills as the Princess' attendant Boyet) let hold them back: With no groundlings to play with the actors clamber over the seated audience instead, as well as using them to hold their toy horses when they're not using them to gallop around the stage. Even the pretentious old academics who appear in the play for some reason just about work, the cast really making fun of their gabbling at each other in Latin.

In a comedy perhaps associated more than most with subtlety and restraint there's no hint of either here, and since the Globe has a tendency to bring out the people who have very strong opinions about the most "accurate" way to perform Shakespeare, I couldn't help but be amused by the thought of quite how pissed off some people are going to be with this production. Personally, much as with The Importance of Being Earnest, I don't particularly see the problem with treating a comedy script as something to get as much comedy out of as humanly possible, and if you can make something out of a play that many more traditional productions stumble over you won't see me complaining.

Bookmarking the play with solemn musical moments of slowly lighting then later putting out the candles, the silliness even makes a kind of sense of the play's notoriously abrupt ending, by highlighting the contrast, making the story a moment of madness in the middle of solemnity. It's not a textbook Love's Labour's Lost but it's the better for it, and there's several moments in it I won't forget in a hurry.

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare is booking until the 15th of September at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse.

Running time: 2 hours 35 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.