National Theatre, London (Olivier Stage)
21 February, 2003
By Philip Kemp for No Ordinary Joe
Love’s Labours Lost is one of Shakespeare’s earliest comedies – and it shows. It’s also one of his very few plays where he has to come up with an original plot of his own, and you can tell that he wasn’t very good at that, either. Most of the time we can feel the Immortal Bard putzing around, throwing in any old nonsense in a desperate attempt to keep the play going and flesh out his woefully thin dramatic material. Much of the nonsense consists of extended scenes of comic ‘business’ for the pretentious Spanish grandee, Don Armado, or the Latin-spouting pedant schoolteacher, Holofernes, and mind-blowingly unfunny they are too. This production at the National, Trevor Nunn’s swansong before handing over to his successor, Nicholas Hytner, does nothing to diminish their tedium. My heart sank every time these heavy-handed caricatures swam into view.
Nunn does pull off, though, one very effective dramatic device – the bookending of the whole action in a terrifying chiaroscuro vision of the First World War. The production opens with a huge, barren tree dominating the Olivier’s wide stage, while behind it a vista of other trees, equally leafless and stricken, recedes into the distance. The visual reference is immediately to Paul Nash’s paintings of the devastated landscapes of the Western Front in WWI, and sure enough a barrage of explosions and gunfire erupts, startling and half-blinding the audience. Amid shouts and agonised screams, steel-helmeted soldiers stagger onto the stage and fall wounded or dying, while an officer frantically tries to help them.
Miraculously the scene lightens and clears. The soldiers vanish. Leaves descend from above, clothing the trees in soft green and changing the mood to one of summer languor. Young men enter, chatting in pastel Edwardian costumes, attended by servants who set up a picnic for them. The officer, dazed and confused, rises and becomes Berowne (Joseph Fiennes), one of the companions of the King of Navarre in their woodland retreat. The frivolous action of the play takes over and we forget the apocalyptic opening. But at the end the nightmare abruptly returns, plunging us back into the mud and blood and wounded screams. This device effectively ‘makes sense’ of the play’s rambling inanities. It becomes the delirious, yearning dream of a lost Edwardian idyll, as glimpsed in the tormented mind of a man suffering through the hell of battle.
Not that the play is a complete waste of time, not by any means. For start, it’s fascinating to see Shakespeare trying out ideas, making first shaky attempts at things he would later do a whole lot better. The charades staged in the final act by Armado and Holofernes foreshadow the spoof drama of Pyramus and Thisbe presented by the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The bantering relationship between Berowne and Rosalyne is clearly a dry run for the similar, but much more tightly-scripted, love-hate sparring of Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado. And the whole masquerade-theme, where characters are deceived by disguise into making love to the wrong people, turns up again in several of the later and more accomplished comedies such as Twelfth Night.
And for all the longueurs, a good many scenes in this production play as light, charming and genuinely funny as the young playwright must have hoped they would. In particular, the scene where Berowne, himself already smitten with love, hides and hears the King and his two fellow courtiers all confess to like susceptibilities, is divertingly played. Fiennes, perched high in the branches of the great tree, grins, groans and grimaces as his companions read aloud their embarrassing love-letters. This scene, and much else in the play, proves conclusively what Shakespeare in Love indicated – that Fiennes is a supremely gifted comic actor.
