The Guardian
March 4, 2003
By Matthew Bell

Love's Labour's Lost is Trevor Nunn's final outing as the National Theatre's artistic director. Despite the odd carp - the Independent on Sunday likened watching Nunn's sugary production to "drowning in a vat of condensed milk", while its sister daily, the Independent , complained of "frequent longueurs" - most critics thought it a fitting finale to his six-year reign.

Nunn sets the play - which tells how four men of Navarre forsake women for a life of philosophy but have their heads turned by the Princess of France and her three ladies - on the eve of the first world war. The production begins with a deafening battle scene, in which one of the men, Berowne, lies wounded, possibly dying, before it leaves the horrors of the western front behind and switches to the last summer before the war. "He brilliantly captures the shocking arrival of death into Shakespeare's sunlit arcadia, which deepens and darkens this apparently trivial play," reckoned the Daily Telegraph. "The genius of Nunn is to make a play that can seem dry and dusty... as fresh and frisky as a summer afternoon - with black clouds looming," added the Daily Mail.

Love's Labour's Lost also boasts some outstanding performances, notably from Joseph Fiennes as Berowne. "Fiennes is a true Shakespearean," said the Sunday Times. "He can combine the formal beauty of this play with the modern man's understanding of where it comes from." The Sunday Telegraph agreed: "Fiennes [gives] a dashing light-comedy performance that gradually deepens to reveal the potential passion of the part and its full poetry."