Kit Surrey's strange set-design for this early Shakespeare comedy of wooing, word-play and mask-games is the only unconventional aspect of Rachel Kavanaugh's disappointing production. Surrey places imposing entrance doors to the King of Navarre's estate at the rear of the stage. The main playing-area is filled with a dozen ladders, between some of whose rungs are placed a row of dummy books. These ladders and the imitation books may be ironic symbols, intended to convey the idea that learning, as opposed to knowledge, will not help you to climb high or far in life. But the ladders are otherwise unused, only achieving a practical function when they serve as trees in which to hide, during the famous love-letters and eavesdropping scene.
Miss Kavanaugh, as if acknowledging the difficulties contemporary audiences have in understanding Love's Labour's abstruse word-games, describes the play with obscure high-mindedness as "this most refractive prism". Her production, set in the Regency period, duly takes itself far too seriously. The fun is laid on, if not with a trowel, then with some lumpen implement, when it should keep a light, dancing spirit. After all, the rush and excitement of sexual desire is the play's doing and undoing. But Benedict Cumberbatch's King of Navarre and his attendant lords, forced by Eros's siren call to abandon their plan of cloistering themselves in academic study, prove charmless, heavy-handed wooers.
Voice coach Mel Church has not schooled her players to speak Shakespeare with tonal variety. Berowne, who soars to an ecstatic celebration of love, is played with anti-romantic sobriety by Adrian Schiller, engendering no sexual sparks. Candida Benson's down-market Princess of France, in a voluminous green and white dress, and her attendant ladies hardly revel in the game of giving their admirers a hard run in the wooing stakes. Even Rebecca Johnson's vivacious Rosaline is a wilting flirter. The comic characters, absurd parodies of the learned man, are broadly sent up by Tim Kightley as a blundering, drunken schoolmaster and Christopher Godwin in exaggerated swagger as the grand, affected Don Armado.
In repertoire. Season ends 8 September. Box office: 020 7486
2431.
Love's Labour's Lost
