[In the following review, Wells praises the Edwardian Oxford setting of the production of Love's Labour's Lost staged at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. According to the critic, the set's visual appeal camouflaged the intellectual obstacles posed by the play's language. However, Wells finds that while the actors’ studied approach to the language made the play more understandable, the pace and comic impact suffered.]

Ian Judge has had the ingenious notion of superimposing upon Shakespeare's many verbal conceits in Love's Labours Lost the theatrical conceit of locating its action in Edwardian Oxford. The court of Navarre becomes the courtyard of an Oxford college, the lodge in the royal park is a porter's lodge, and Don Adriano de Armado is not the only don on the horizon. John Gunter's charming basic set of old stone walls and mullioned windows festooned with greenery adapts easily and wittily to suggest a variety of locations: a high-backed settle trundles on, and we are in a buttery bar (Balliol, I fancy); puffs of smoke plus a few sound effects and it is clear that the Princess and her companions have arrived by train; Holofernes and Sir Nathaniel converse in deck chairs, while watching and applauding a cricket match that takes place somewhere in the auditorium; an awning descends to show that the entertainments of the last act are not unconnected with a May Ball. Deirdre Clancy's costumes, no less elegant for the men than for the women, complete the sense that this is the world of Zuleika Dobson, though the level of comedy at times brings us closer to Charley's Aunt.

The production's inventiveness and visual charm mitigate the obstacles posed for a modern audience by the artifice, intellectuality and archaism of much of the play's language. The style of its frequently rhymed, urgently rhythmic verse invites a speed of delivery that may skim so rapidly over the surface of its content that meaning is lost. Here, the actors often adopt a deliberate pace, stressing content rather than style, resisting the verse's insistent forward thrust in a search for subtextual nuance. The technique pays dividends in intelligibility and in individual characterization, especially of the young men. It is easy to conceive of the King and his courtiers as aristocratic, clever, but immature undergraduates, and this dandyish band of students, led by Owen Teale's King and Jeremy Northam's Berowne, pick their way elegantly through their verbal affectations, springing to urgent life only with Northam's delivery of Berowne's great hymn to love.

Not all is gain. The pace is inclined to drag, we may even wonder whether it would not be better to be rattled along with only a generalized impression of what is being said than to be invited laboriously to inspect sentences some of which are none too intelligible at any speed. Only Paul Greenwood as Boyet strikes a uniformly right balance between pace and clarity.

The reduction in intellectuality is accompanied by an emphasis on romance, as if in an attempt to humanize a text that may seem cold. Daniel Massey stresses the pathos of Armado's infatuation for the wench Jaquenetta rather than the absurdity of the terms in which he expresses it, and the use of music (by Nigel Hess) not just in interludes but also in settings for some of the verse slows the pace too. The greatest loss is a reduction of the comic impetus of the play's two most sustained set pieces. The scene in which the men successively but unwittingly reveal to one another that each of them has broken his vow not to fall in love loses its sense of comic inevitability if, as here, the emphasis is on sentiment rather than satire. And in the last act, one of Shakespeare's most complexly calculated stretches of continuous action, the impact of the entrance of Mercadé, the messenger of death, is softened if the director has not sustained a comic brio that carries us forward rather than inviting us to linger on detail, as in lapses into silliness with Armado's tango and in the staging of the masque of Muscovites. Here, as at times in John Normington's skilful but undercharacterized Holofernes, the comedy would be richer if we felt the characters were taking themselves more seriously.

It is only with the ladies' rejection of their suitors' offers of love that the full point of the Edwardian setting becomes clear. We may have idly noticed that the sun has never ceased to shine: this has been a long hot summer. And as the ladies depart, leaving Berowne to lament that the delay of twelve months before their courtship can have a happy ending is “too long for a play”, the backdrop changes from the spires of Oxford to Flanders fields; we hear the noise of gunfire and of shells, and know that the idyll is over. The lights fade, the actors take a call, the audience applauds.

It may seem a portentous and forced ending, an unnecessary deflection from the shock that Shakespeare has already provided with the news of the King of France's death, but it makes an effective concluding coup de théâtre. Or at least it would have done if Ian Judge had had the courage to stop there, cutting what remains of the play. But no. The actors halt our applause, the dialogue resumes, and the evening ends with a trivializing setting of the songs of the owl and the cuckoo. With the final waltz number for the entire company, the actors waving to the audience as they depart, we are in the world of showbiz, of Edwardian musical comedy, in an evasion of the challenges of Shakespeare's own, highly original ending to one of his most brilliantly experimental plays.