5 STARS, REVIEW: Love’s Labour’s Lost, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, until 18th May
If there’s one thing we Brits really love, along with our dogs and our wellies, it's unmasking a hypocrite. Chancellor Zahawi and his ‘careless’ tax dealings. Johnson’s covid edicts versus his devious office parties… We just can’t get enough! Often the miscreants arrive via social media – so oft, in fact, that it raises the question whether the world is becoming ever more rotten or it’s just that the miracle of modern comms is bringing more shockers to account.
Luckily for us, Shakespeare provides our answer. The pivotal scene in Love’s Labour’s Lost proves without a shadow of a doubt that the hypocrite has always lurked amongst us. In fact, on stage right now, hilariously attempting to hide from one another on, above and under a marvelously ornate revolving staircase, are four prime examples of said species – all exultant in exposing one another’s iniquity while guiltily harbouring their very own.
The deal, you see, was this: each of this quartet of handsome, moneyed chaps has foresworn the company of women and other laddish pleasures to live at a glam billionaire spa retreat for three years to improve their academic and spiritual studies. And each, while proselytising the virtues of abstinence, has cheated as soon as four gorgeous girls hove into view.
Let’s meet these fellows shall we: there’s Abiola Owokoniran’s Ferdinand, the suave boss of the group; Luke Thompson, the star draw from TV’s Bridgerton is Berowne, the most reluctant participant in the pact; Eric Stroud’s our silly Longaville and Brandon Bassir’s the easily-led Dumaine. As a pack they’re believably buddy-bonded and bushy-tailed with bravado until… well, you can’t really blame them when the babes rock up.
What an irresistible quartet of cool, smart stunners. There’s Melanie-Joyce Bermudez’s Princess, come on a mission to reclaim lands owed to her ailing father. She’s accompanied by Ioanna Kimbrook’s flirty Rosaline, Amy Griffith’s elegant Katherine and Sarita Gabony’s cheeky vaper Maria. Individually they’re all so wowsa ... and together – forget about it! They’re utterly formidable, a pampered force the boys have neither nous nor wit to reckon with. So far, so sensible, right? I mean, even though this is thought to be quite an early Shakespeare play so prone to a lot of show-off-y verbosity, in the hands of director Emily Burns it enjoys itself hugely.
The cast is uniformly fabulous - that’s fabulous as in the full dictionary meaning by the way: unassailably terrific – and the way they go about sashaying through the plot is an exquisite choreography of poses peppered throughout with ripely ridiculed pronouncements and extravagant pronunciations. It’s all really rather marvellous – an abundance of golf carts badly driven and folks stripping down to their undies as if to prove their honesty – but the scene most likely to win any award for the funniest staged by the RSC in 2024 will surely go to the bit where the boys dress as knights in full clanking armour and creak their way through Backstreet Boys’ I Want It That Way. Why? Who cares? It’s brilliant.
It’s at this point I feel moved to invent a new collective noun. Here it is: the play boasts an absurdity of others – a motley collection of the what-the-heck-and-why-are they-heres? They are namely as follows: Don Armado, a sweaty Spanish tennis coach resplendent in indecently tight Y-fronts. In all honesty, he’s one of Shakespeare's more unfortunate racist caricatures that haven’t travelled well down the centuries but there’s enough balderdash in Jack Bardoe’s OTT showing that we chortle despite our better selves. Then there’s Tony Gardner’s Holofernes, a pompous windbag who resembles nothing so much as Leonard Sachs, the tiresome geezer who used to spout his verbal diarrhea to inane audience “oohs" and “aahs” on The Good Old Days, an abominable TV music hall recreation that had alarmingly survived, like an unwelcome virus, into the 1970s and beyond to plague a viewership eager for more groovy fare like The Man From Uncle, Avengers and Magpie.
Why Holofernes is here – excellently played as he is – is anyone’s guess but when he and some other ancillaries stage The Nine Worthies, a daft play-within-a-play, we are watching a dress rehearsal for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in which he will return triumphant as Bottom.Another inclusion that caused me some confusion was Boyet, the ladies’ gofer/confidante, played with an admirably nonchalant passive-aggressiveness by Jordan Metcalfe. He seemed to have strayed in by accident off the set of Seinfeld. Which, I should point out, is about as far from a bad thing as you’re ever likely to get.
And finally there’s Costard. Heaven’s knows who he’s meant to be or what he’s doing here but he’s a delight, a tsunami of sulks and pouts, a veritable monument to reluctance, played with heroic camp indifference by Nathan Foad who seems to revel in having even less of a clue as to what he’s here for than we do and, bless him, the coup de grace, couldn’t give a toss.
Did I mention the set? It’s a thing of beauty. As this is not a play that’s done very often, I can’t rightly say whether Shakespeare intended any observations about class or whatnot to emerge from the relationships between the masters and/or mistresses and their minions but if he did, they were not apparent here. And the performance didn’t really unearth any fresh or relevant profundity from Emily Burns’ decision to have it updated to feature rich inhabitants of Silicon Valley and servile odd-bods around the place but when it all looks this sumptuous, gosh, no matter.
One thing that did strike a contemporary chord, however, came near the start. When the lads are signing up to the dreaded pledge, they ostentatiously rid themselves of their mobile phones which made me laugh because at this time of year, with GCSE and A level exams mere weeks away, there will surely be youngsters who would have enjoyed the show tonight had their mums and dads not banished them to their bedrooms, phones most likely confiscated, to get on and study, their revisional chores ironically echoing LLL’s plot.
These draconian displays of parental duty are, if the family elders I know are anything to go by, the very height of "do-as-I-say-not-as-I-did” hypocrisy. Let’s face it, no matter that we all grow up determined not to be anything like our parents, we invariably find, as the years and responsibilities pile up, that we are lapsing into them. You hear yourself saying stuff to your kids that your pater and mater said to you, an echo that, whilst eliciting a shudder, also admits to some sympathetic understanding of their motives. For their – and our – hypocrisy is born not of deceit or guile but, rather, the opposite, from love and concern. I mean, show me a parent who claims to be innocent of hypocrisy and I’ll show you a liar. (Mea Culpa, obviously). The boys, as I’ve said, come to an agreement that the school of life experience is of more value to them than a whole heap of book learning.
It’s a decision arrived at in convenient accord with their enflamed libidos but it also offers Shakespeare the opportunity to take the well-travelled route home and conclude that love conquers all. It’s an option he brutally declines. Just as the couples look like getting it on, news arrives that the Princess’ father has died and the four fab femmes hasten away to 12 months of get-thee-to-a-nunnery mourning. Naturally the fellers protest and each is presented with a vague matrimonial promise on a proviso that they pursue year-long tasks involving charity and chastity. The pertinent point here is ‘vague’.
As the chaps have already ditched one solemn oath, the ladies have no confidence in the men’s moral backbone to carry it off. Not to mention the fact that the girls themselves may stray. There is no forgiveness to be found, none of that biblical "let he without sin cast the first stone” malarkey. No happy ending. All there is is suspicion and a soupçon of hope, tempered by doubt. Shakespeare leaves us to imagine what happens next.
There’s a sequel here begging to be written. If it were up to me, I’d do something with it like David Lynch did when he flipped the reality/dream scenario of Lost Highway into the dream/reality one in Mulholland Drive. In other words, I’d test the exiled-from-nooky gals’ resolve against temptation to see if they are really made of all things nice and not slugs ’n’ snails like the boys
.Anyway, all the talk on the way in was about how this was the inaugural show under the aegis of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, the RSC’s new co-artistic directors, so it had better be bloomin’ good. And it was. Very.
