[In the review below, Maguin offers a favorable review of the production of Love's Labour's Lost directed by Terry Hands. Maguin is appreciative of the unflagging rhythm of the production and the abilities of the principal actors, who expressed the dialogue with “rare clarity.”]

Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Terry Hands, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, 23 January 1991, evening, back stalls centre.

The set, designed by Timothy O'Brien, combines richness of colour with architectural flatness. A dominantly green backdrop is fretted over with small splashes of autumn gold and red made to come to life as the lighting plays over them. Bushes and trees are formed into a series of screens beyond which, when they open up, a steep bank is seen to rise from a neat paper-like fold in the stage floor. The latter's green baize cover enhances the artificiallity of the structure. The constraint upon nature which Navarre's academic scheme is about to thrust upon his friends turns this particular clearing in the forest into something like a billiards table, where the carefully cued characters of Shakespeare's comedy are going to telescope and spin off one another to be all pocketed by Marcade (an impressive, top hatted, black-clad Griffith Jones), the messenger of Death at the end of the game. Up the slope races Navarre when his rustic retreat is invaded by the party of deliciously and dangerously untrained lady hunters, complete with bows and arrows. The plump figure of Simon Russell Beale, cast as Navarre and dressed for the summer in comfortable cream linen—all the costumes are Edwardian—, dribbles back down again, defeated by the gradient, and hurries offstage at a tangent. To save him from the danger of unexpected female company, the stage director adroitly plays him off the cushion. The vegetable screens are extravagantly coloured as if spring and autumn had merged for this the high noon of romantic love. Lighting, immaculately directed by Terry Hands, is subtle and touches the walls of foliage with gorgeous splashes of blue. A host of bougainvillaea at the flick of a switch. … Props and furniture are kept down to a fair minimum. The French princess's tent, auditorium left, is barely suggested by a light triangular canopy, while a clothes line close-by witnesses to the makeshift nature of the French settlement in Navarre's clearing.

The opening of the performance heavily relies on interpictoriality. Long before the opening lines, and for as long as the most cautious of spectators has occupied his seat in the house in anticipation of 7.30 p.m., Navarre, Longaville, Dumaine, and Berowne, present onstage, have been finishing Edouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l' herbe. All the elegance and gourmet touches are there in the white cloth spread on the ground, the hampers and the bottle of champagne, … with one capital difference: there is no female nude. Navarre's Academy-to-be is no co-ed school. The spectators feel that the titillation of incongruous female nudity has with symptomatic haste and trembling of the hand been cut out of the canvas they are made to look at. The suspect gap in this male-only picnic spoils ab origine the air for the project of “a little academe”. The director manipulates the plot into a clever visual intertext. A “No Women” notice at the entrance of the clearing hits the nail on the head for those whose artistic memory banks should happen to be slow or depleted.

The rhythm of the production never flags even during the dangerously thin masque of Muscovites, here livened up by the prancing of a tall, lank polar bear adopted by one of the trio of Navarre's friends as a disguise. The pageant of the Nine Worthies is duly chopped up by its impossible audience. The eavesdropping scenes of the beginning shake the bushes like a storm, while the local inhabitants' lives are coursed through by the maelstrom of Alex Kingston's unabating sexual glee as Jaquenetta. Her performance is an amazing mixture of provocation and innocence—with never a trace of vulgarity—carefully played against the slow, meticulous embarrassment of Paul Webster as Sir Nathaniel the curate. He would, at one stage, dearly love to rest his hands on his lap while listening to the expatiations of friend Holofernes if only Jaquenetta, lying on the ground as she does by his stool, were not absentmindedly twiddling the toes of one foot just there. David Troughton is a wonderful Holofernes, physically as cumbersome as is the schoolmaster's rhetoric, with defective R's that turn up in his mouth as thick and fast as greedy spoonfuls of hot porridge. His lexical copiousness receives the help of a pocket thesaurus. Simon Russell Beale (Navarre), Bernard Wright (Longaville), Paterson Joseph (Dumaine, as much “in the nose” as some bagpipes), Ralph Fiennes (Berowne), John Wood (an unforgettably stern yet melting Don Armado), Richard Ridings (paralytically slow and deep-voiced until he surprises himself out of his act right at the end of the play by an unexpectedly high note) all deserve special acclaim. The ladies' performances (Caroly Royle as Princess of France, Katrina Levon as Maria, Caroline Loncq as Katherine, and Amanda Root as Rosaline) are flawless. The company, despite the thinness and artificiality of the individual parts, are obviously having a good time together and so are their audience with them. The text of the play, reputedly difficult, comes over with rare clarity. This signal achievement compares with that of the Troilus and Cressida production at the Swan.

The production ends on a nocturnal performance of the owl's and the cuckoo's songs which alternates the stanzas of Hiems and Ver so that “The words of Mercury [do not] sound [too] harsh after the songs of Apollo”. There is a deliberate climatic mellowness about Terry Hands' goodbye to Stratford.