London’s Globe Theatre is back! After four years, the company returns to New York with their new touring production of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. This mind-stretching comedy, in which Shakespeare mocks pedantry and affectation, is seldom staged. But now at the Michael Schimmel Center at Pace University, the play is taken out of mothballs and given sturdy stage legs.
Dominic Dromgoole, who succeeded Mark Rylance in 2005 as Artistic Director, has chosen to do the play in a Renaissance mode. And it works like a charm. To translate it to this era seems just as legitimate as any other pseudo-historical time. And the “translation” is consistently carried out under Dromgoole’s firm direction. The costumes are richly embroidered and the set design (Jonathan Fensom) uncluttered, allowing the characters to roam through Navarre like a college campus and freely meander through the theater’s aisles. The original music (Claire van Kampen) is played on period instruments, evoking an aristocratic aura that ideally suits the story and structure of the play.
Based on a very fragile line of action, Love’s Labour’s Lost is an early play of Shakespeare’s written circa 1595, shortly after he penned his sonnets. Incorporating English, Latin, French, and creative errors, the work is preoccupied with words, words, words, and how arbitrary any word can be in a given situation. Its characters are more pastel sketches than fully-fleshed out humans. And though the central character Berowne is the most memorable of the play’s personnel, even he is a lightweight when compared to the likes of Benedict from Much Ado About Nothing or Bottom from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
The action takes place in Navarre, an enclosed Utopia, where the King of Navarre and three of his noblemen have vowed to seriously study for three years, abstaining from every pleasure of the flesh. But the arrival to Navarre of the lovely Princess of France, and her equally lovely three companions, soon complicate matters. And not surprisingly, the four young men, who were so bent on a contemplative life, all of a sudden feel romance on the wing. They begin to compose sonnets and love letters, to dress in disguises and flirt with the young women.
In this production, Shakespeare’s “sweet smoke of rhetoric” is delivered with relish by the company. An ensemble effort, no actor seemed to upstage another, or to hog the stage. Two of the actors in the leading-roles are continuing from the original London production: Michelle Terry as the Princess of France; and Trystan Gravelle as Berowne. In addition, fourteen other actors are continuing from the London production.
My one quibble with the production is the lack of palpable chemistry between the would-be lovers—with one striking exception (more later on this). That bit of electricity that should have been sparking about was sorely lacking. To be sure, you get the couples’ word play, their sexual puns, their rule-breaking, but not one of the four aristocratic couples seemed head over heels in love. Ironically, only the dairymaid Jacquenetta and her wooer Armado were convincing as a match. Jacquenetta’s bawdy behaviors were on display before Act One opened and she kept on with her risqué flirtations right through the finale.
The men have better roles than the women. And no doubt the character Berowne (Trystan Gravelle) has the lion’s share of speeches. If his monologues sound a little over-the-top, they are meant to be in this splendidly mellifluous play. The other male part that is hugely compelling is the comic pedant Holofernes (Christopher Godwin). The character might not have the romantic conceit of Berowne, but it nonetheless is a great role for sending up Latinate phrases and all sorts of pretentions. In the pageant scene with the “Nine Worthies,” Holofernes is heckled by the gentlemen for his acting and has a meltdown in the play-within-the-play. Driven from the stage, he feelingly cries: “This is not generous, not gentle, not humble.” Shakespeare, who loved all his characters, truly sends out a deeply human message here.
Although this play does not have a well-connected plot and action, it compensates with its rich plumage of words. Over the years, scholars and critics have alternately disparaged and praised it. Some demoting it to a revue; others elevating it to an operetta; many complaining that it’s dark ending is completely unsuitable for a comedy (“Our wooing doeth not end like the old play:/ Jack hath not Jill”).
Ah, well. As performed by London’s Globe Theatre in this bang-up production at Pace University, I am prepared to simply call it Shakespeares’ best-kept secret.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, at Pace University’s Michael Schimmel Center for the Arts, located at 3 Spruce Street.
Tickets are $25-$75, phone (212) 868-4444 or visit http://www.smarttix.com
Runs through December 21st.