The Independent on Sunday
March 2, 2003
By Kate Bassett

Presumably Love's Labour's Lost is meant to be Sir Trev's gooey, goodbye treat. It's one helluva lavish, sugary farewell from the National's outgoing artistic director. Apologies if I sound ungrateful. I think it's splendid that Nunn contributed some of his own money to the National. However, watching his staging of Shakespeare's early romantic comedy – translated to an Edwardian country estate – is like drowning in a vat of condensed milk.

John Gunter's set is pretty as a picture – a Merchant Ivory picture. Maybe the movie contract has, in fact, already been signed as Joseph Fiennes' Berowne and his three aristocratic chums idle in linen suits in a forest glade that comes complete with hectares of real grass, a vast beech and cohorts of gamekeepers and cute village schoolboys. Nunn's choruses of "common folk" always look peculiarly cheesy though they do alert you to class relations.

This lot are soon joined by the four ladies who distract the lords from their sworn devotion to books by swanning round in lace gowns. Regrettably, this is all so excessively gorgeous that the "gorge rises at it", especially when composer Steven Edis's syrupy score is added to the mix.

And it doesn't mask the potentially arid and bald aspects of the script – the archaic jokes and schematic couplings. A better antidote would have been for Nunn's actors to really exude the zest of youth and of sharp minds stimulated by schooling. Berowne's beloved Rosaline, played by Kate Fleetwood, is more smug than sparky, and Fiennes' Berowne is a handsomely lolling humorist with no aggressive edge. So the tempering penance his sweetheart imposes on him – trying to make the dying laugh for a year – seems peculiarly harsh.

Still, some scenes charm with Simon Day's nerdy King and Olivia Williams's teasing yet sensitive Princess. The narrative frame Nunn imposes, where Berowne is perhaps fatally shot on a First World War battlefield, also fits with the sombre turn this comedy takes.