Peter Viney's Blog

Love’s Labour’s Lost
by William Shakespeare

Directed by Nick Bagnall
Designed by Katie Sykes
Composer Laura Moody & James Fortune

Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at The Globe

Saturday 1st September 2018, 14.30

CAST:
Dharmesh Patel – Berowne.
Kirsty Woodward- Princess of France / Dull
Paul Stocker – King of Navarre / Holofernes
Jade Williams – Rosaline / Jacquetta
Tom Kanji – Dumaine. / Sir Nathaniel
Leaphia Darko – Katherine.
Charlotte Mills – Boyet.
Jos Vantyler-Don Armado.

Costard is played by members of the company

MUSIC
Laura Moody – MD, cello, voice
Joley Craig – percussion
Louisa Dugan – harp

I’ve never understood why The Globe has kept the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse for the winter, as if it were as weather-dependent as Shakespeare’s indoor / outdoor theatre switch in 1610. There are odd concerts, but they have not played whole productions through the summer. I’ve now spoken to friends from the USA, Canada and Germany, who love theatre, have visited The Globe in the summer, but don’t see London as a great February vacation destination. They all expressed a desire to see a real play in the Wanamaker. They should run productions in the Wanamaker all the way through the year, just as the RSC does with The Swan Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Theatre. The Wanamaker is ideal for the less popular plays too. Love’s Labour’s Lost is a less popular play, though it’s one of Michael Billington’s 101 Greatest Plays, coincidentally the third we’ve seen in a week following Copenhagen and last night’s The Importance of Being Earnest.

Well, Love’s Labour’s Lost breaks the pattern of an empty Wanamaker, and gets underway in August.

The four noblemen … hang on, there are only three of them.

This year, the Globe approaches the Reduced Shakespeare Company whose long running show of The Complete Works of Shakespeare has a cast of three. This has just eight. The original play has eighteen named roles, plus “lords and attendants” and the RSC production in 2014 (revived in 2016) had a cast of twenty-three. The basic storyline has four lords and four ladies before we even get to any other roles. Nick Bagnall has previously directed the touring productions of Two Gentlemen of Verona and Henry VI where a small cast has a virtue in a variety of performing spaces. I can’t see any sign that this one is touring though. I looked back at other Wanamaker Playhouse productions over the last few years. Twelve to fourteen actors seems the norm. So why create a mountain to climb by having a cast of just eight? Certainly, the “actor-centric” 2018 regime at the Globe doesn’t extend to employing a sufficient number of actors.

An issue for us is that we saw that elaborate and wonderful RSC version at Stratford, then when it was revived in Chichester, and we also have the Blu-ray. It’s heavily imprinted.

Cutting four lords and four ladies to three is OK, as long as you cherry pick the best lines from the four and mix and match them into the three. They also eliminate Don Armado’s servant, Moth, by making him Don Armado’s imaginary friend with a shift of accents from Spanish (Don Armado) to Yorkshire (Moth).

There is a concept. They add an opening scene of Kirsty Woodward, as the princess, looking through a box of toys years later, then they come alive. This is done to delicately beautiful music. A very fine start …

The King of Navarre has persuaded his three friends Browne and Dumaine (sorry, two friends) to forswear the company of women, and devote their lives to study for three years. Dumaine is keen. Berowne is dubious. They make a solemn vow, then they recall that the Princess of France is coming on a visit. They are each attracted to one of the four, sorry, three ladies. The ladies are escorted by Boyet, a “gossipy lord” though here played as female.

Kirsty Woodward as The Princess of France, Paul Stocker as The King of Navarre, Leaphia Darko as Katherine

The celibacy order extends to everyone in the court. Don Armado a Spaniard, wants to arrest a “rustic”, Costard, for pursuing a dairymaid, Jaquenetta (a female version of Jacques, the Elizabethan slang for toilet). That’s because Don Armado is after her himself. Armado lets Costard go on condition he gets a love note to Jaquenetta. Browne gives Costard a letter for Rosaline. They get mixed up.

Each of the lords despairs of their inability to express their love one at a time, but the others overhear. The lords disguise themselves as Russians but knowing this, the ladies all switch identities. So each woos the wrong one.

Meanwhile Don Armado approaches the schoolmaster, Holofernes, and the curate, Sir Nathaniel to join him in presenting a pageant of the Nine Worthies to entertain the court. Shakespeare’s company was getting fed up with amateur pageants by the nobility taking away their touring income at stately homes such as Wilton House near Salisbury (a visited recorded there), so lampoons such a show.

The sudden shift among jollity is a messenger arriving to announce the death of the Princess’s father. They vow to meet in a year, which might well be a tale told in the missing play Love’s Labour’s Won.  According to the RSC in 2014, that missing play was Much Ado About Nothing under a different title. Others suspect there was a direct sequel with the same characters. While we have Spanish nobility in Much Ado, it takes place in Sicily. So I agree there was a different lost play.

The French girls are here …

Reaction? It might be the best music I’ve heard at The Globe or Wanamaker. The sublime three piece not only do full production and backing pieces, they also accent lines,and follow onstage movements with added backing throughout. The long end piece “Cuckoo” is beautifully sung.

Next, the costumes make sense as a toy-box style, and have been thought about, unusual for the Globe this year.

It was hampered by me doing something I swore I would never do – book seats in the upper gallery. We did the first time we went to the Wanamaker. The thing is, from the upper gallery,  the candelabra obscure the actor’s heads, so you are watching torso down acting. We were square on to the stage, so actually had a good view along the middle, but couldn’t see actors heads at the sides. I know at the gallery sides, you see very little at all. The candelabra need to be higher.

Then it seemed the director had no idea of the space. There’s a crucial early scene with Don Armado imploring Jacquenetta while Costard watches. Costard was square under a candelabra, so for us just knees and boots were visible. Then Don Armado and the dairymaid were back in the central entrance way below. We were in the front row of the gallery, but leaning right over we could not see either of them at all, even for a second. Just shouting somewhere out of sight. You can do that for a line, but not for a dialogue.

There are several stand out featured pieces. The arrival of the ladies on hobby horses to music. Don Armado sings a duet with his alter-ego, Moth, on “To All The Girls I’ve Loved.”  Jos Vantyler brought this off with instant loud applause from all of us, the best moment of the play. But that was his singing in two voices, not the play. The Muscovites in disguise not only dance the Cossack stuff, but sing a hilarious Russianized version of “Lady Marmalade.” In the pageant, Don Armado, possibly as Hector, but who knows, I’d totally lost track in the dire pageant, descends twisting on wires and does all the funny “Get me down” stuff.

All excellent. Trouble is, as a version of Shakespeare’s play  Love’s Labour’s Lost it is incoherent, garbled, incomprehensible in storyline AND I know the RSC version very well. We had a quiet morning, and I read the full scene by scene synopsis in the RSC/ Macmillan edition beforehand too.  I still couldn’t follow what was going on. As a rendition of Shakespeare’s story, in spite of hugely energetic input from the cast, it fails to gell. It is a total mess with some outstanding disconnected bits.

Paul Stocker as Holofernes,  Jos Vantyler as Don Armado

The Don Armado talking to himself was highly admirable in voice changing and gesture, but the text content is “Shakespeare clown” at its worst, and was lost altogether as having any sense in having one guy doing both. Then they did Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel in the balcony, and it came across as uncontextualized meaningless guff. Just way too much doubling up. Who were they? I knew because I know the play, but it was a bit you’d cut. It was one of the few bits we in the Upper Gallery could see clearly, being above the flickering candles, but I know from experience it was the part those in the Lower Gallery wouldn’t see through the candles. Fortunately Berowne delivered some speeches from up there. Why on Earth had they decided that the Princess of France (a fine actor in previous parts) should deliver her lines in a wooden “off” style?

For the first time in seven years of The Globe, including a few poor productions, at the interval my companion said “I really cannot face them murdering the second half. This is total crap,” and left to watch the River Thames flow by instead, while I endured Part Two. That is a zero stars. I was watching the musicians so intently (you can see the gallery over the candles) that my interest was kept by them. Personally, I thought Michelle Terry’s “Globe Ensemble” As You Like It worse in having poor music and dreadful costumes combined with misguided gender-blind production, but then the sunshine and atmosphere compensated. You can get away with a lot outdoors at The Globe on a pleasant afternoon.

So … music and musicians, a clear 5 star.  Outstanding composition, playing and singing.
Costume? Three star.
Set? Excellent use made of the toy box for disappearing people. Three star.
Candles? Zero stars, though the candle supervisor gets mixed in with the actors’ bios in the programme, as if ANYBODY wanted to know.

In the TV sitcom Upstart Crow Series 3 (a few days after seeing this) we see David Mitchell as Shakespeare writing Love’s Labour’s Lost. “Now I just need some incomprehensible subplots” he cries. Quite.

Production and direction? The play? One star.

*

The links took a long time. The cast are highly Globe / Wanamaker experienced, and also several have worked together before.  It has two of the same cast, Charlotte Mills and Dharmesh Patel, who were in Nick Bagnall’s last Wanamaker play Two Gentlemen of Verona in 2016.

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

I thought those two star reviews were generous.

4 star

Paul Taylor, The Independent ****

3 star
Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph ***
Miriam Gillinson, The Guardian ***
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times ***

a staging that works the comedy so hard that we lose sight of any meaning. FT

Francesca Peschier, The Stage ***
Henry Hitchins, Evening Standard ***

Some Shakespeare comedies are always delicious, and others seem doomed to be obscure and unappreciated. Love’s Labour’s Lost belongs in the second category = occasionally admired for its wit and neat structure, yet mainly treated as a tricky, wordy oddity …… (here) mostly the comedy is dialled up to eleven, packed with pratfalls, ludicrous wigs and daft voices. Henry Hitchins 30/8/18

Laura Jones, Broadway World, ***

2 star
Dominic Maxwell, The Times **

A good cast has been given its head to such an extent that the fun of individual moments tends to overpower their significance to the story. Dominic Maxwell

Matt Trueman, What’s On Stage **

Laughs laboured. Lost.

Andrez Lukowski, Time Out **

Think of a particularly unruly Saturday morning kids’ TV show, or one of those late ‘Monty Python’ series that are more weird than funny, or a gifted but irritating Oxbridge sketch troupe. Everything is exaggerated and overamplified into a clangorous cacophony of too damn much. Andrez Lukowski 30/8/18

LINKS ON THIS BLOG:

LOVE’S LABOUR’S LOST:
Love’s Labour’s Lost– RSC 2014
Love’s Labour’s Lost– RSC 2016 revival, at Chichester

NICK BAGNALL (DIRECTOR)
Henry VI Parts 1 – III, Globe, touring in 2013, at Bath
(as Harry The Sixth, The Houses of York & Lancaster & The True Tragedy of The Duke of York) Nick Bagnall had to step in and play the Duke of Suffolk himself on the day.
The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Wanamaker Playhouse and tour, 2016

DHARMESH PATEL
The Captive Queen, by Dryden, Wanamaker Playhouse 2018
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017
Julius Caesar, RSC 2017
Antony & Cleopatra, RSC 2017
Cymbeline, Wanamaker Playhouse 2015 (Soothsayer, Philario)
The Tempest, Wanamaker Playhouse 2015 (Ferdinand)
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Wanamaker Playhouse 2016 (Proteus)

CHARLOTTE MILLS
The Country Wife, by Whycherley, Chichester 2018
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Wanamaker Playhouse 2016
Therese Raquin, by Zola, Bath Theatre Royal 2014
The Winter’s Tale, RSC 2013,
Jerusalem by Jez Butterworth, London 2011 (Tanya)

PAUL STOCKER
The Two Noble Kinsmen, Globe 2018

JOS VANTYLER
The Two Noble Kinsmen, Globe 2018
The Merry Wives, Northern Broadsides, 2016 (at Guildford)

KIRSTY WOODWARD
Tristan & Yseult, by Emma Rice, Globe 2017
The Winter’s Tale, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
Pericles, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015

JADE WILLIAMS
The Seagull, Chichester 2015
Platonov, Chichester 2015

TOM KANJI
The Country Wife, by Whycherley, Chichester 2018
The Winter’s Tale, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2016
Pericles, Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015
Romeo & Juliet, Globe 2015
Julius Caesar, Globe 2014