The Telegraph
24 February 2003
By Charles Spencer
Photograph by Alastair Muir

Trevor Nunn is ending his tenure as director of the National Theatre with this ravishing production of Shakespeare's early comedy and I just hope he doesn't feel his own labour of love there has been equally in vain.

He has been the victim of much carping in the press, but I suspect many of us will come to regard his five-and-a-half years at the helm of Britian's flagship theatre as a golden age.

His own production of the Merchant of Venice and Gorky's Summerfolk were among the greatest shows I have seen anywhere, ever, and I have almost equally cherished memories of his cracking revivals of My Fair Lady and his current hit, Anything Goes. The National has hardly been a powerhouse of daring and innovation under his stewardship, but it has been the home of may magnificent nights of theatre.

Love's Labours Lost is a risky choice with which to say goodbye. It is one of the most artificial of all Shakespeare's plays, full of impenetrable work play, conceit-laden poetry, and punishingly tedious clowns. When done badly, it is intolerable. Nunn, however, makes it live, and though even he and his fine cast can't make complete sense of the interminable verbal quibbling, he brilliantly captures the shocking arrival of death, which deepens and darkens this apparently trivial play in the last act.

The action begins with a deafening, bewildering First World War battle scene. This, you realise with a start, is the hero Berowne's present reality.

But as the wounded, possibly dying, man lies on the battlefield, his mind flashes back to the last golden summer before the Great War, with the rest of the action set in the grounds of a great English Country house.

At the end, following news of the death of the Princess's father, which halts the high spirits and wordy wooing and sees the dawn of a new seriousness, the action flashes forward again to the fields of Flanders. Everything we have witnessed suddenly seems like a distant dream, and we realize the truth of Berowne's perception that is it impossible "to move wild laughter in the throat of death".

It was an inspired idea to cast Joseph Fiennes as Berowne. The actor is best known for his performance in the title role of Shakespeare in Love, and if we have a self-portrait of the young Shakespeare, Berowne is surely it. He is witty, cynical, self-mocking, but with an ardour and tenderness about him too, qualities all superbly caught by Fiennes.

There's plenty of outstanding support, with a delightful comic performance from Simon Day as a silly-ass King of Navarre, from Kate Fleetwood as a vivid, teasing Rosaline, and from Robin Soans who turns the pedantic schoolmaster Holofernes into a great comic turn.

But this is above all Nunn's night, and the virtuosity with which he captures the play's comedy and its deeper feeling, while also creating ensemble scenes of pure stage poetry, is a reminder of just how much he will be missed.