The Observer
March 2, 2003
By Susannah Clapp

Trevor Nunn bows out of the National Theatre with a martial production of Love's Labour's Lost

Trevor Nunn's production of Love's Labour's Lost is addressed to a country on the brink of war and a theatre in the throes of regime change. And Nunn has created an occasion to mark these endings, an evening flooded with sunlit nostalgia and fringed with darkness.

He bows out as artistic director of the National with a production that transplants the romantic action of Shakespeare's comedy, in which a band of would-be celibates succumbs to love, to a bosky Edwardian England. In John Gunter's majestic design, a huge tree is dappled with shade and layers of lacy leaves. There is birdsong and the buzz of insects; there is music, with some of the riper speeches being sung; there are sandwiches and civility.

This belle époque suits Nunn's aesthetic. His canvas is populated with girls who scamper, women trailing long dresses and little-boy proles looking on in caps. The detail is exquisite: young couples, intent on badinage, follow the flight of an unseen bee as if tracing the line of their wit. And the sense of idyll is heightened by threat. The play is seen as if in flashback, framed by First World War battle scenes, with Shakespeare's final melancholy words repeated at the beginning. The evening opens and closes with greyness and gunfire.

All this graphically responds to the mingling of love and loss in the play. Joseph Fiennes is an athletic Byronic hero (though with too much eyebrow work); Robin Soans is an excellent dry-as-dust fusspot. But the visual lushness comes at a cost: it swaddles the complications of the dialogue. Nunn, who could have exited gloriously with Anything Goes, has not made things easy for himself. Love's Labour's Lost is the most knottily worded and clown-stuffed of Shakespeare's plays, one of those comedies which is hardly ever funny.

Its satire on pedantry and high-falutin' language is full of the sort of Elizabethan wordplay with which schoolteachers used to embarrass their pupils by chortling at and, indeed, the play contains one such schoolmaster. The most reliable laugh of the evening comes when the poor sod called Dull, taxed with not having spoken a word, bleats that he hasn't understood one either.

Michael Grandage, the Donmar's new artistic director, is taking a strong pro-European stand, a counterblast to the American imports of his predecessor, Sam Mendes. The latest continental classic he's dusting off, with a new translation by Simon (Men Behaving Badly) Nye, and a cracking production by Robert Delamere, is Dario Fo's 30- year-old farce about corruption in high places.