Times Online
February 22, 2003
By Benedict Nightingale

I've seen revivals of Love’s Labour’s Lost that updated Shakespeare to the Edwardian era, and one that ended with offstage explosions, suggesting that cataclysm is coming. But Trevor Nunn’s production, his last for the National before he retires as its director, actually begins with what seems to be the Great War itself.

There are ear-smashing bangs, eye-splintering flashes, and into the forest murk rush soldiers, among them a subaltern identifiable as Joseph Fiennes, who is due to play that elegant wit, Berowne. He falls. Is he dying? He looks up as Edwardian ladies and affable rustics pour onstage. Is he a ghost about to haunt his own past? Is the play his memory of a time that couldn’t last?

I’ve been on my hotline to Parnassus about what would seem to be a big liberty with the play, but I don’t find Shakespeare too outraged.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a series of games, mostly love games, played by the King of Navarre, Berowne and two other lords with the visiting Princess of France and her ladies. But it ends unromantically, with the sudden announcement of the French king’s death. A black cloud has come to darken a golden day.

By briefly bringing on that cloud at the start, along with the French messenger of death, Nunn gives what follows a more textured, elegant feel. It is still sweet, maybe even sweeter now that we sense the fragility of these aristocrats. Soon they will emerge from their European Brideshead, or Wodehousean idyll, to learn the meaning of death.

You’ll recall the story. Navarre and his friends vow to renounce all women and most food in order to study philosophy; but the vow is quickly and entertainingly subverted by that lacy, scented incursion from Paris. Blood triumphs over bookishness. Here, the world’s grim realities triumph over the beautiful milieu that Nunn and John Gunter have created: lolling on the grass, déjeuner sur l’herbe, and cobwebby, Watteau-like leaves disappearing behind a great, gorgeous tree. Nearly all the performers are also appearing in Nunn’s production of Anything Goes, which explains why some love sonnets are robustly sung.

They’re pretty good, too, especially Simon Day as a Navarre who hides insecurity behind a supercilious, slightly priggish exterior. I’d hoped for more fun from the subordinate classes, particularly from Martin Marquez’s moustachioed Iberian, Don Armado; but maybe that’s the price of Nunn’s approach.

Fiennes is excellent: debonair, sophisticated, but wiser, deeper than any Berowne I’ve seen. The paean to love with which he persuades the king to recant his foolish vow is usually played jokily. Here it’s quietly passionate, you might say deadly serious — and, coming from Navarre’s Siegfried Sassoon, really rather moving.

4/5 stars

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