[In the following review, Morse comments on a Parisian production of Love's Labour's Lost directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, characterizing the production as a successful black comedy.]

Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota's singular Love's Labour's Lost is sold out—and it is not hard to see why. His black comedy, in which the women have the better of it from the start by puncturing the young men's utopian fantasy, offers a rite of initiation into the brutalities of desire, and the accompanying shame of honour betrayed. As both Biron (Benjamin Egner) and the young Princess of France (Marie-Armelle Deguy) point out, the King of Navarre (Gerald Maillet) is on a hiding to nothing. The absence of cakes, ale and female company is a road not to virtue but to deceit. They may be swearing to devote themselves to three years of “philo”, but reality keeps breaking in. Their rhetoric comes to sound wonderfully like the subject of an essay: “comment l'amour fait changer le discours”. Discuss. The play is a polyphony on loving and talking.

An imaginary Navarre is a sandy-floored plain, framed by a stylized arcade. There is no accommodation in sight. With the accent firmly on what the words create, the occasional intrusion of real things is almost shocking: in the hunting scene, the ladies shoot real bows and arrows, and they are accompanied by a real hawk which they really fly. When a lover scrabbles in the sand to reveal real water beneath, both sand and water seem themselves and metaphors for drought and release. In a self-consciously theatrical reference, the first appearance of Costard (taken prisoner for criminal conversation with the opposite sex) at the end of a rope recalls Pozzo with Lucky in Waiting for Godot. The play's dark side is evident throughout, and not just in the surprise ending. Biron can observe that the fairy-tale sentence of “a year and a day” is “too long for a play”, and the reflection is consistent with the style of the preceding two hours and twenty minutes.

Demarcy-Mota is six years younger than Shakespeare was when the play first appeared, and his cast no older. They are strikingly beautiful (the women gorgeously costumed in colours which contrast with the men in black), and they speak the verse well. Ana Das Chagas, as a tiny, androgynous Moth (translated as “Tom Thumb”), makes a glowing Page, whose wit is only one of the play's commenting voices. Youth has its limitations, however. Casting Boyet (Jean-Pascal Abribat) as a young man is a weakness in a councillor, and narrows the play's range.

François Regnault offers a highly stylized translation, full of rhymed decasyllables and risking elaborate plays on words. The jokes are, after all, visible a long way off. In a clever touch, his pedants speak English rather than Latin. His equivalents are often slangy and vulgar. The non-realistic mode invites the audience to indulge the farce, the dishonesties, the bad poetry, the delight of eavesdropping on someone else's passion, or the Masque of Muscovites. The figure-of-eight-lovers begin as, rightly, barely distinguishable (though Valerie Dashwood's Rosaline soon creates a fine complement to her mistress the princess), and the sub-plot's low-comedy parody of their aristocratic posing adds to the confusion.

Once again a director has persuaded young audiences to come to the theatre and sit for two hours without a sign of restlessness. The double bluff of ironizing True Love is formulaic, and irresistible, sentiment redeemed by satire and conversely. “Jack hath not Jill”, and he has publicly acknowledged the limits of legislating, either for or against her. As so often in Shakespeare's comedies, it is the women who bring the men to their senses, who urge them doubly to get a life, and to get real.