One of the major strengths of Barton's 1978 production was the revelation that the extravagant language used by the characters is a form of verbal mask, an artificial front to their true feelings. The characters spoke in "elegant, precious and self-conscious language not because Shakespeare is writing such language but because they are showing off, or defending themselves against feeling, or trying to communicate but tying themselves in knots while doing so."43
This is especially true of the character Berowne, who gets the larger share of the play's poetry and wit. In David Jones's 1975 production Ian Richardson's central performance captured the essence of the play. He later revealed that it was his favorite part in the canon, believing that Berowne, the excellent wordsmith, was no other than Shakespeare himself. The part, he said, "stands out above all the Shakespeare roles I've ever played, as being the one I love the most. Curiously enough it does seem to be the role that Shakespeare might have written for himself.... Here is Shakespeare talking, here is the man himself with all his verbal quips."44
Critic Michael Billington, in praise of Richardson, reported that "you realise this is really a play about the process of growing-up; and that under its formality, artifice and endless topical allusions, it is a work that captures the very rhythm of life itself":
This transition from artifice, to true feeling is nowhere better illustrated than by Ian Richardson's masterly performance as Berowne. Whether breaking out in sighs that seem to hail from his bootstraps or tearing up the letter that reveals the breaking of his vows of study, he is frantic, word-drunk and possessed by the spirit of love. Yet in his great hymn to Cupid he drops all vocal artifice and when he declares to Rosalind, "I am yours and all that I possess" you feel he has learnt the virtues of true sentiment and direct speech.45
Men in Love?
The lack of seriousness with which the young men take their oaths, the hapless bandying of the language and manners of courtly love, their genuine unkindness toward the participants of the pageant, might give a girl cause for concern. As director John Barton put it in his 1965 program, "ridiculous and impracticable" as the oath may be, "it is an oath all the same, and a serious one. So when the King and the rest break it at the first sight of a woman's eyes, the girls are justified in questioning their oaths of love."46
In his 1978 production Barton offered a "new and most fruitful shift of emphasis"47 by having the Princess of France and King of Navarre take a more prominent role, of equal importance to Rosaline and Berowne. He also deliberately cast against type with Richard Griffiths and Carmen Du Sautoy as an inelegant pair, instantly drawn to each other. These factors imbued the play with a warmhearted basis that has not been surpassed by later productions:
[Carmen] Du Sautoy's Princess and Griffiths's King are obviously meant for each other, and they fall in love almost at first sight. When she says "suddenly resolve me in my suit," she holds out the letter and there is a long pause. He fumbles for words--"Madam, I will if suddenly I may"--and her answer, completely without sarcasm ... sounds as if she is struggling to put words together.... Characteristically, as the King reaches out for the letter from her father, she accidentally drops it; both she and the King bend over to pick up the letter, the Princess gets it and hands it over to him, but both are embarrassed by the small mishap.... He turns away to read the letter while she turns away--and takes off her glasses. The immediate falling in love of these two slightly clumsy and unromantic-looking people becomes very touching and creates a gentle tone for their relationship ... so different from the elegant and usually self-assured rulers found in other productions.48
In their appearance and manner one was aware of the genuine emotion that was blooming between them. These were not people beguiled by the artifice of appearance but were soulmates, insecure in themselves and their positions, able to understand each other and the difficulties of matching up to royal status.
The relationship between Rosaline and Berowne complemented that of the king and princess, further emphasizing the real passion burning beneath the words. As Warren notes in Shakespeare Survey, Michael Pennington's performance had "an intense, almost erotic lyricism for the great defense of Love, which rightly became the climax of the first half. This scene typified the production's quality, building superbly from one humorous peak to another, without loss of humanity: the lords' poems were not guyed, but rather became the rapid, passionate release of pent-up desire."49
In 1984 and 1990 there was a marked discrepancy between the maturity of the men and that of the women--the women appeared far more sophisticated and in control than the men, who were portrayed as relatively immature. This left the audience with a large question mark over the issue of whether or not genuine feelings of love lay behind their declarations. In Barry Kyle's production (1984), Kenneth Branagh played Navarre as
a boyish, amiable monarch whose attempts to be strict with himself and his courtiers were doomed from the beginning. His shyness is soon overcome by his enthusiasm for the pursuit of the ladies.... Against Emily Richard's Princess--older than Navarre and much more mature in her emotions--he seems like someone making the transition from adolescence to early manhood. In the last Stratford production (by John Barton) it was suggested that the Princess was about the same age as Navarre, if not a little younger.... the Princess's self-confidence and maturity were in as critical a stage of development as Navarre's.... Berowne (Roger Rees) obviously takes the prize for experience and self-knowledge, but his counterpart, Rosaline, is moody, withdrawn and something of an outsider amongst the women. Josette Simon plays her with an abrasive and uncompromising quality that goes so far as to imply absence of any warm feeling toward Berowne. As the only black woman in the court, she wears her hair in a severe, close-cropped style and is no less severe in her attitude to the men.50
The critic for The Observer aso highlighted the isolation of Josette Simon's Rosaline: "What she thinks of him we never find out, for ... Simon plays her elegant and reserved, cold indeed, often at the edge of groups and sizing Berowne up with a wariness that argues an experience of pain unknown to the rest."51
Similarly, in Terry Hands' 1990 production, Carol Royle as the princess came across as defensive against love. Her costuming with military overtones hinted at readiness for battle with the opposite sex. She was
cool and assured, wearing a gorgeous mauve dress with a huge hoop skirt, the bodice of the dress trimmed with military-looking stripes. Her parasol and her hoop always created space around her, making her virtually untouchable.... Only at the end did she seem both composed and gentle in her treatment of the King, but since the composure had always been present, there was no noticeable change when she heard about her father's death.52
The very contrasting personality of Simon Russell Beale's king left a credibility gap which again hampered the audience's belief in the possibility of genuine emotion: "if a production wants ... to suggest at last that there may be some hope in these relationships, its presenting of the king as a more or less unmitigated chump and the princess as an astute operator, coolly aware of the power of her femininity, left one wondering what she saw in him."53 "Gender confrontation was followed through to the end of the evening where the women were clearly embarrassed and ashamed of the men's vicious cynicism at the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, Simon Russell Beale's King sharing the women's distress."54
In this production the artifice of the wooing rituals indicated that these immature men were in love with love rather than with the women as individuals. This interpretation was best demonstrated when the men went a-wooing in disguise but could not tell to which woman they were speaking:
The four lords court the four ladies first as Muscovites, in which guise they are mockingly dismissed, and later in their own persons. Their emotional immaturity and the fact that they are essentially still acting parts are communicated by the ridiculous comic disguise. In Hands's production one was in a bear costume; in 1993 the men appeared as dancing Cossacks. They return to the game of courtship as
themselves where Berowne is chastened into plain speech:
Henceforth my wooing mind shall be expressed
In russet yeas and honest kersey noes.55
Other relationships in the 1990 production further highlighted the young men's romantic posturing, especially the passionate portrayal of Don Armado by John Wood:
From his first entrance, collapsing on to a heap of cushions, Wood's Armado was madly illogical with a grasshopper mind. Yet his devotion to Jaquenetta was affectingly obsessive, passionately excited by her easy display of sexuality, as he crawled around after her exit [in Act 1 Scene 2], kissing the carpet wherever she had trodden.... As the stage cleared, Jaquenetta came on into the light previously occupied by Mercade, and Don Armado, happily ready for his three years' vow as a ploughman, kissed her, a tender act that the other nobles would never approach.56
In comparing the productions of Barton (1978), Kyle (1984), and Hands (1990), the theater historian Miriam Gilbert explored the essential difference in their handling of love:
Kyle and Hands chose to underscore the sense in which the love is primarily an illusion at which we smile. If so, then the ending is less surprising and less painful than if the audience has been asked to believe, even fleetingly, in the reciprocal feelings of the men and women.... The disparity between the emotional and social maturity of the Princess and that of the King [in 1990] makes it difficult to believe that the Princess ever feels, or could feel, anything for him. A schoolboy crush on an older and more sophisticated woman is plausible, but not a reciprocal feeling.... Barton's solution--showing both men and women as insecure to some extent--allows the audience to see the possibility of reciprocal love developing even though we also understand that whatever these people feel for each other needs time for testing and for growth. Later productions have been less successful in conveying such a possibility.57
Peter Holland criticized Ian Judge's 1993 production for supplementing the lack of genuine emotion with an overbearing musical score, which only created an artificial illusion of love. Like the soundtrack to a Hollywood movie, the music indicated what the audience should be feeling, overcompensating for the director's lack of belief in the accessibility of Shakespeare's plot and characters:
Ample resources of comedy must in Love's Labour's Lost be balanced by an understanding of love and this production signally failed to provide it. Every expression of love was heavily underscored by Nigel Hess's overscored music swelling beneath; the young men's poems became songs and Don Armado's farewell to valour ... an excess of musical ardour. The saccharine sentimentalism of musical pastiche smothered any possibility of accurate depiction of emotion under its cliches. Judge's versions of love were all of a piece with such faked romantic feeling.58
It appears that key to any successful production of Love's Labour's Lost is a sense of emotional reality. Directors avoiding the pitfalls of the language often miss the point that so much of what the characters say is full of "airy nothings," evasion, and intellectual posing. Dull's succinct reply to Holofernes' "Thou hast spoken no word all this while," "Nor understood none neither, sir," is often singled out as the greatest moment of hilarity in a production. The audience are relieved by his straightforward honesty and identify with him. It is the big moment of release from the verbal lunacy of the spheres of court and academia, love and intellect. As "John Barton's [1978] production demonstrated ... ordinary theatergoers can respond to the verbal pyrotechnics of a set of wit well played even when the historical dimension eludes them"59--and sometimes because it eludes them. The conditions of the women at the end are not just a love test, but a test of language and humanity. With knowledge and language comes responsibility, and the educated young men have to learn to wield their linguistic powers, whether in matters of the heart or the head, with greater care: "Gently but firmly, the men are sent away to learn something that the women have known all along: how to accommodate speech to facts and to emotional realities, as opposed to using it as a means of evasion, idle amusement, or unthinking cruelty."60
THE DIRECTOR'S CUT: TERRY HANDS AND LIZ SHIPMAN
Terry Hands, born 1941, studied at the University of Birmingham and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1964 he established the Liverpool Everyman Theatre, then two years later he joined the Royal Shakespeare Company to run its touring group, Theatregoround. He became joint artistic director with Trevor Nunn in 1978, and was sole artistic director from 1986 to 1991. He has also directed many productions in Europe, notably at the Comedie-Francaise in Paris. His cycle of Shakespeare's history plays, with Alan Howard in leading roles, was among the highlights of the RSC in the 1970s. In 1997 he became artistic director of Clwyd Theatr Cymru. Here he discusses his RSC production, which opened in Stratford in 1990 and transferred to the Barbican in London in 1991.
Liz Shipman is cofounder and associate director of the Kings County Shakespeare Company (KCSC) in New York. She served as its co-artistic director from 1985 to 2001 and has directed many Shakespearean productions there. She also teaches in the Theatre Arts program at the University of San Diego, specializing in a movement-based approach to acting. The production that she discusses here was performed as part of the 1998 Kings County Shakespeare Festival in Brooklyn, New York. Because the action is seemingly set entirely out of doors, Love's Labour's Lost is a play that has been peculiarly amenable to outdoor production.
Whereas most Shakespearean plays sweep across many locations, this one is confined in an enclosed space--an enclosure that seems very important to what the play is about. Directors and designers have re-created the "little academe" as, say, an eighteenth-century aristocratic fete champetre (Peter Brook suggesting the paintings of Watteau) or--perhaps more predictably--an Oxford college. What did you and your designer go for, and why?
Hands: Love's Labour's Lost is set in a park--an open space where gentry and villagers can meet easily and informally. The "little academe" is an improvisation--as unexpected as it is improbable. It fails very quickly, and part of that failure is the reality of the country life that impinges upon it, and sex. In 1990 the designer Timothy O'Brien created a world that was inspired by Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe, but also, in its execution, by Signac, Seurat, and Monet. His idea was that the world of nature should be represented as vibrantly as possible with colors mixing in the eye of the beholder rather than on the palette. If Navarre's artifice were to be overwhelmed by nature, then that nature should be overwhelming. Frankly I don't think the period matters much. The world is probably, and not for the last time, Charlecote [the aristocratic house and park just outside Stratford, which Shakespeare knew well].
Shipman: The production was set in the early twentieth century at Navarre's "country estate." It was presented in the round with each entrance (four voms*) leading to an outdoor courtyard of sorts. There was a large, central, raised hexagonal platform surrounded by three large movable benches that could be shifted in the space according to the needs of the scene. The entire space was a "marbleized" white and extended throughout the audience areas. One of the four entrances into the courtyard arrived from the "outer world." One led to the king's parklands. One opened into the courtyard from the main house where Navarre and his close comrades reside. The last came from an outer building reserved for guests--Don Armado and Moth. The idea was that Navarre's estate was the centerpiece of the surrounding community. His grounds and park were open to the people, hence the traffic that passes through during the events of the play. The playing area was open and expansive. Scenery was minimal--limited to a simple set element in each vom, such as a few broad steps flanked by urnlike planters, a garden gate, the suggestion of a large tree, and the set was dressed with occasional greenery. The overall impression was of lightness, warmth, and springtime. Costumes were of natural fabrics and were in whites, creams, and warm colors. The arrival of Marcade in formal funereal black offered a stark contrast and, appropriately, signalled the end of illusions and youthful fancies and the reemergence of reality. Our intent in setting the pla
y in the graceful environs of a wealthy country estate just prior to the First World War was to capture the audience's imagination with a time within a not-too-distant past that stood on the edge of a major sociopolitical change--a time of promise that was interrupted by a tragic event that ended an "age of innocence." I felt that this setting was consistent with what I understand to be the themes central to the play.
7. The men are constantly in competition with one another. The women are more successful because they always work together as a group. Boyet is their spokesman: from left, Rosaline (Janet Suzman), Maria (Katharine Barker), Boyet (Brewster Mason), Katherine (Jessica Claridge), and the Princess of France (Glenda Jackson) in John Barton's 1965 production.
This is the Shakespeare play that almost reminds us of a Mozart comic opera. It has a kind of musical structure, with all sorts of symmetries and counterpoints. A nineteenth-century production once combined it with the music of Cosi fan Tutte (which also has paired lovers and Muscovite disguises). And in Thomas Mann's great novel Dr. Faustus, it is the play that the composer Leverkuhn is turning into an opera. To approach it in a quasi-musical way, structurally, perhaps helps draw attention away from all the recondite language, the Elizabethan in-jokes. Did you have any thoughts along these lines?