Love's Labour's Lost

This is one of Shakespeare’s toughest plays to pull off. Written when he himself was a young man, it tells the tale of four lads trying to cope with love and life. They are no ordinary lads, but royalty and aristocracy (led by Anthony Pinnick’s King Of Navarre). The conceit of the play is that they all swear to abstain from many of life’s pleasures for a period of three years (like you do). The main article of their oath, and obviously hardest to adhere to, is that they will abjure the “company” of women. Enter the female entourage led by the Princess of France (Lauren Russell), and predictable mayhem and confusion arises, as the four lads attempt to woo the four lasses without letting their pals know they are breaking their oath.Director David Mouriquand has done a pretty good job of editing the piece down to a palatable hour and fifteen minutes. His direction is not so secure, not aided by some patchy acting. This is a very demanding script for young actors. Shakespeare himself was still learning his craft when he wrote it, and was still rather hamstrung by the use of endless rhyming couplets, a device he soon abandoned in favour of the much more freeing blank verse. To make this jangly stuff work you need very good actors. Pinnick and Russell are probably the best of the bunch, though I also liked Alex Purvis’s Boyet. The other performances lack the necessary skills. There is too much downward inflecting and a lot of distracting upstaging of the main action going on. The audience I watched with did laugh quite a lot, but more at some inventive business and funny accents than the dense script.This is a play about language as much as anything else, the young writer rather showing off his own use and flair with it. A shame, then, that it was hard to hear some of it, particularly from the women. Paul Aitchison’s Costard (usually the comic tour de force of the piece) is far too underplayed. He also resorts to clumsy magic tricks when the script itself offers him plenty of opportunity to be interesting and funny. The other star part is Berowne, here taken on by Pat Lenney. This character is the heartbeat of the piece, a young man who is already a cynic, particularly about love. The turning point in the piece (“And I forsooth In love!”) is completely missed, not because Lenney is a bad actor (he’s rather good) but because he paces feverishly about during the delivery.Trust the text – it’s very good, and I predict the writer will go on to big things.