Successful productions have usually recognized the need to update the play, to transpose period and setting to give it a contemporary edge for modern audiences. The American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, staged a production in 1968 directed by Michael Kahn that deliberately set out to satirize 1960s popular culture. The four young aristocrats from Navarre became
versions of the Beatles, especially since they were pursued by teenyboppers and camera-flashing reporters as they arrived for the first scene. Like the Beatles, they escaped the modern world to go to India/Navarre where the long-haired and full-bearded King, accompanied by incense-bearers and a sitar player, wore a long white robe and, though noticeably younger than the Maharishi, obviously alluded to that cult figure.14
Kahn believed that "presenting the play in a contemporary setting created a world that was simultaneously glamorous and yet easy to make fun of," a world in which the satire of "trendiness of language and feeling" would be immediately recognizable. The 2006 revival of this production included in the RSC's Complete Works Festival testified to its continuing vitality.
Karel Kriz staged a radical, innovative production at the National Theatre in Prague in 1987 in which the "dominant element on stage was an ornate fire curtain."15 In 1989 Gerald Freedman directed Love's Labor's Lost as part of Joseph Papp's ambitious series of productions of Shakespeare in New York's Central Park. Freedman set his play in the 1930s, an era, he believed, "when appearance was all," and used "a row of confetti-like strips of colored paper for a curtain to suggest the festive nature of the goings-on."16 Trevor Nunn concluded his period as Artistic Director of Britain's National Theatre in 2003 with a production set in the early twentieth century: "Nunn's most striking concept is to set this Love's Labour's Lost as a dream sequence on the battlefields of the First World War. Men about to die horribly are given a brief glimpse of the love they will never know."17
4. Transposition to the counterculture: Michael Kahn's revival of his 1960s production, played by the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., during the RSC's Complete Works Festival (2006).
The 1930s was the setting for Kenneth Branagh's film musical adaptation of 2000. Sympathetic to the concept, most critics found its realization incomplete: "The project was a promising possibility, not an instant sacrilege. The trouble is that the promise was not well-kept."18 As A. O. Scott suggested in the New York Times,
There is no doubting Mr. Branagh's sincere enthusiasm for the material, which is not only Shakespeare but also old newsreels, Casablanca and classic MGM musicals. He throws them together with the gusto of a man playing a tuba with a bass drum strapped to his back while his pet monkey leaps around with a squeeze box. It's not art exactly, or even music, but it's entertaining, albeit in an intermittently annoying kind of way19
AT THE RSC
Designing Navarre
"Staging a play in which Coleridge found 'little to interest as a dramatic representation' and which Dr. Johnson thought 'childish and vulgar' can be a stiff task," began one reviewer in response to Terry Hands' RSC production of 1990.20 Yet with its masques and pageant, and the awakening of the young men to the realities of love, the play offers itself to a very modern, even postmodern, self-conscious exploration of artifice and performance--both onstage in the action of the play, and in the theater between the real audience and the actors.
Some directors and designers have begun from the (unsubstantiated) conjecture that the play might have been written "for open air performance in a nobleman's garden."21 They have accordingly taken the opportunity to look at different types of acting space in a beautifully scenic but stylized way. Many have opted for set designs that, either through their painterly quality or their attempt to mimic reality, have emphasized the artificial nature of the world the young men inhabit. Irving Wardle in The Times (London), writing about the 1973 David Jones production, explained how Timothy O'Brien and Tazeena Firth's set design consisted of
a grassy floor with a pair of pole-like trees pushing upwards through a green canopy. The canopy is the main feature of the set: raked downwards to the back wall it forms a silken roof overprinted with magnified leaf photographs. Beautiful to look at, this also supplies a perfect visual metaphor for the play itself, which equally shows nature appearing through an artefact.22
One reason for the play's revived success on the stage is the almost artificial nostalgia or fairy-tale quality to this refuge for love, which for most of the play remains untouched by the cares of the real world. Populated with "endearing rustics and academics who seem to be smiling out of an old-fashioned children's book,"23 the escapist quality of the play is part of its attraction. The design of the 1965 production directed by John Barton offered a reminder of reality in the lighting created by John Bradley, which illuminated the action as if it took place in a single day. This worked in juxtaposition to the highly stylized set:
The Sleeping Beauty-like wooded background of Sally Jacobs' set is dappled with bright morning sunshine in the early scenes, with the longer shadows of the afternoon following--both to be finally eclipsed by nightfall which, appropriately enough, coincides with the announcement of the French king's death and the play's consequent abrupt and final shift of mood.24
With its box hedges and coutured costumes, the design suggested the garden architecture and formal dress of an aristocratic country house in a world dominated by artifice. The pretensions of the young men, and their attempt to avoid the real world, were played out in a leafy idyll, shattered only by the inescapable reality of Death. In the words of the review in the Financial Times,
The King of Navarre's Court has put on black to signalise its withdrawal from pleasure and its three-year dedication to abstinence and study; and the trees in the King's park ... have turned black to match, and gloom over the revels in a rather forbidding way. The Court removes its mourning dress once the oaths of the courtiers have been broken; the trees are denied this privilege.... There isn't very much sparkle about King Ferdinand's Court. The King and his chums get the lion's share of such good poetry as there is in the play, but their sombre clothes seem to have reacted on their mood, and they revel, jest and make love in rather a subdued frame of mind.25
In 1973, Irving Wardle in The Times praised director David Jones for turning "the play's stylistic artifice to dramatic advantage":
From its opening mock-funeral procession--where the four votaries cast their gay clothes into an empty coffin--the production develops under the shadow of death. A joke to begin with, it imposes its lasting separation in the final scene, just as sex, begun as a holiday game, enmeshes them in harsh responsibilities.26
The onset of darker days is not always so blatantly advertised. Most productions opt for a softer, more autumnal feel--the stage often being littered with fallen leaves, as in John Barton's second production, played in 1978 and described in Shakespeare Survey:
Enormous boughs of cascading autumnal leaves entirely enclosing a raked wooden forestage, behind which seats and a leaf-strewn floor suggested distant parkland. But there was no external glamour about the two courts, which seemed humbler, less formal, than usual: the lords took their oaths with little ceremony on a rustic seat; Rosaline cleaned the Princess's travelling boots and the travel-stained hem of her skirt in their first scene, and swept up autumn leaves with a broom in the last; the King and the Princess, especially, were very unelaborated, untidy even, in appearance, ordinary human beings rather than heads of state, especially when they first met, a rather endearing, unimpressive, bespectacled pair: a long silence indicated sudden (to them embarrassing) mutual attraction.27
Barton's production was favorably received by audiences and critics alike, but some others in a similar vein have been less so: there is a risk of overlaboring the elegiac point. As the theater historian Russell Jackson points out,
Directors and (especially) designers who take their cue from the wistfulness of the ending are in danger of sentimentalising the whole performance. The autumnal
languor that sometimes bathes productions of the play--in anticipation of the final scene--can work against the comedy itself. Directors sometimes use the quizzical and pathetic element in the endings of Shakespearean comedy as a pretext for being wise not merely after but during and (in the souvenir programmes) before the event.28
5. Stage design assisting the comedy of deception and overhearing: Roger Rees as Berowne and Josette Simon as Rosaline in Barry Kyle's 1984 RSC production.
With regard to the onslaught of reality, we are left in no doubt at the end of the play that the young men are about to enter into a different form of education, based on real experience in the wider world. Whether or not love penetrates their artificially constructed refuge from life is a debatable matter, but set designs for Love's Labour's Lost often reflect the idea of romantic love. In 1984 a statue of Eros, the Greek god of love and sexual desire, dominated the set of Barry Kyle's production--a visually stunning design, suggestive of French Impressionist paintings, but which also pointed toward the battle between the sexes:
We are in turn-of-the-century France, and against a distant prospect of silhouetted lovers strolling along a leafy lake-side, Bob Crowley has mounted dozens of parapluies on telescopic stems, thus cleverly creating an impression of mock battle-standards under which the lovers wage their struggle.29
In 1990 Timothy O'Brien's set took the theme of French Impressionism further with "a pointillist agglomeration of autumnal leaves--yellow, red, gold and brown--glinting in the dense greenery of a private idyllic forest."30 The production opened with a deliberate reference to one of the most controversial paintings from the early Impressionist movement. Critic Peter Holland described how
French impressionism turned three-dimensional, its trees and hedges vivid splashes of colour. The lords sat for the first scene picnicking, reading and sketching, in a tableau carefully arranged to remind the audience of Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, though here with Manet's naked women conspicuous by their absence. By 2.1 the garden had been cordoned off with a sign "Interdit aux femmes."31
The idea of male education in isolation, combined with verbal exhibitionism and the immaturity of young men in the ways of love, prompted Ian Judge to put two and two together and set the play in an Oxford college. Peter Holland again:
The loss of the court setting, as in Hands' production in 1991, was here more than offset by the immediately recognisable world of "academe" in which young men, in single-sex colleges, had to balance their commitment "to live and study here three years" (1.1.35) against such temptations as "to see a woman in that term" (37). Nathaniel became a college chaplain, Holofernes a "Professor of Latin" (according to the programme, Moth ... a well-scrubbed student chorister and Costard a local delivery boy).32
Critic Stanley Wells elaborated further:
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 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 ... 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.33
The Edwardian setting also offered an opportunity for a poignant reading, reminding the audience that the play is as much about loss as it is about love. Wells continues:
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 theatre. 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 for 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.34
6. Edwardian Oxbridge: the Worthies plan their pageant in a cricket pavilion (directed by Ian Judge, 1993, RSC).
Words, Words, Words ...
As comedy, Love's Labour's Lost displays a fascination with language as the tool of wit, learning, and persuasion at all social levels.
According to John Pendergast, John Barton's 1978 interpretation suggested that
the linguistic acrobatics of the lower-class characters such as Moth and Costard were similar in spirit to those of the more sophisticated characters such as Berowne and Armado; although the upper-class characters may be more "correct" when they speak archaically, they are experimenting with the possibilities of language in a manner similar to the lower-class characters and all the communication in the play is an attempt at sounding sophisticated.... The language comes to serve the characters' personalities, rather than the reverse.... For example, rhyming is used by the young men as part of their wooing yet it also suggests wit and immaturity. Armado and Holofernes are not nearly as witty as they think they are, and their speech habits reflect their pretentiousness and Old World ways.35
Despite all the lovers' overblown rhetoric, Costard is the character that cuts to the chase when he tells us "Such is the simplicity of man to hearken after the flesh." Robert Speaight remarked of John Barton's 1965 production:
Mr Tim Wylton was quite rightly mounted on a farm-cart for this stupendous utterance, although his own authority was quite enough to articulate the wisdom of babes and sucklings. This Costard was much more than an endearing lout; he ... communicated a kind of heroic happiness which suffused the whole play. Just as Feste acts as a go-between in Twelfth Night, counterpointing comedy with cynicism, and retiring at the end into solitude from which he emerged at the beginning, so Costard is a go-between in Love's Labour's Lost. But Costard is too wise for the intelligence of cynicism, and when the stage has emptied one sees him retiring with the other Worthies, perhaps for a drink at the Vicarage, perhaps for a drink at the schoolmaster's house, or perhaps for a drink at the pub. But wherever he is, he will not be alone, and we should like to be in his company, because he has said in one line what Berowne has said in twenty.36
Christopher Luscombe, who played Moth in 1993, thought that "our Oxbridge setting ... helped to take the curse off some of this elaborate wit. In academia such conversational cut-and-thrust seemed entirely natural. Friendships are forged in the delighted discovery of new vocabulary."37
Kenneth Branagh played Navarre in the RSC's 1984-85 production and in 2000 was to direct a film version, again with an Oxbridge setting. He observed the dilemma for directors in tackling such a wordy play:
The play is full of rhymed line endings. Verbally, or musically, it is a "great feast of language." This presents some difficulties for actors and producers. They have to decide whether to play the language to the hilt knowing that, because it is so dense, the audience isn't necessarily going to pick up everything, or whether to slow it down a bit in order to try to give away as much of the meaning as possible. This may be a reason why the play has been neglected since Shakespeare's day really until this century.38
&nbs
p; Ian Judge's 1993 production utilized the musicality of the language, turning it into one of the production's assets, something that Branagh also did with his film, when he shot the play as a 1930s musical:
A musical comedy without music is how one critic described Love's Labour's Lost.... This Brideshead-style academia has pretty ballads, a turkey trot by [composer] Nigel Hess and a set of French misses in Poiret frocks.39
In 1984 the ridiculous song about the fox, the ape, and the humble-bee was turned into "a first-class music-hall routine."40 However, many critics felt that the final song was given a too sophisticated staging, overelaborated by redundant stage business:
This is rendered by an operatic singer who has already appeared between some of the scenes as one of a band of picturesque (and languorous) peasants, vocalising what sound like bits of the Chants de l'Auvergne. For the concluding lyrics the singer is accompanied by the rest of the cast, who provide such literal-minded illustrations as a sneezing peasant girl (Marian's nose is red and raw). The operatic voice is confident and accomplished, so that any sense of tentativeness is lost, and the music's sophistication makes it less credible than usual that the parson and the schoolmaster might have been responsible for the song.41
In 1965 and again in 1978, as Roger Warren notes in Shakespeare Survey, John Barton, emphasizing the language and its imagery, made the innovation of having the final songs spoken,
thereby throwing greater emphasis onto their vivid images of country life; but he extended the idea so that all the villagers echoed the "Cuckoo" and "Tu-whit, tu-who," and, even more important, the court led by the King and Princess joined in too, so that the stage became filled with harmonious echoes of country sounds--exquisitely capped by the hooting of a real owl above their heads, magically reinforcing Shakespeare's own final emphasis upon the ordinary realities of country life. Such an extraordinarily complex scene, which takes the breath away with its combination of gaiety and sadness, its blending of affairs of state, of the heart, of the countryside, is Mr. Barton's special territory as a director.42