Review: Love's Labour's Lost (More or Less) at Shakespeare North Playhouse ****
Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare’s early comedy, doesn’t often get staged these days.
Even the RSC only seems to return to it every decade or so; I have happy memories of an Edwardian Oxford-set version at Stratford in 1993 (when Jeremy Northam played Berowne and Owen Teale the King of Navarre) and a touring version, again set just ahead of the First World War, which came to Manchester in 2014. Last year they returned to the play and brought it bang up to date with tech bros going digital cold turkey on a remote island.
There’s not a corset or boater, or indeed a Shakespearean ruff, to be found in this gleefully irreverent new adaptation by Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane. Although it does have an island setting.
There’s not an awful lot of Shakespeare in evidence either; the play’s title has the added parenthesis (More or Less), and when it comes to original text it’s definitely on the ‘less’ side.
While Godber and Lane do check in with the First Folio on and off through the show, they mostly chart their own loose, larky course through Love’s Labour’s Lost’s central plot, nodding in the direction of the Bard with rhyming wordplay and roistering horseplay.
It’s the late 1990s and lovebirds ‘Ferdy’ (aka Navarre) and Yvette (the Princess of France) are jetting off with mates on their respective stag and hen weekends to separate Mediterranean hotspots.
Above: Timothy Adam Lucas as Ferdy. Top: Hens Boyet (Jo Patmore), Rosie (Alyce Liburd), Yvette (Annie Kirkman) and Mary-Kate (Alice Imelda). Photos by Patch Dolan.
When there’s a last-minute change at the airport, Yvette and co find themselves diverted from their planned destination (Malaga) and deposited instead on the mad-for-it party island of Ibiza where the lads have already checked in for a boys-only bash.
But it’s not all sun, sea, sangria and sex as Ferdy (Timothy Adam Lucas), Berowne (Thomas Cotran) and Long-Demain (Linford Johnson) have reluctantly pledged to Yvette’s dad that they won’t talk to any women over the three days (a bit of a downgrade from Shakespeare’s original three years’ abstinence).
The arrival of the hens inevitably puts the cat among the pigeons, while elsewhere a classic Shakespearean confection of mistaken identities and mishaps causes requisite havoc through intertwined subplots.
Imagine if you will The Inbetweeners meets Carry On and you have some measure the enjoyably preposterous action that unfolds to a cheery soundtrack of 90s bangers performed live (and unleashed) by the actors.
Godber, Lane and director Paul Robinson have gone all in for comedy with a capital C and the eight-strong cast plunge into the spirit with evident and infectious glee.
Above: Love's Labour's Lost (More or Less). Photo by Patch Dolan.
It’s go big or go home, and no one goes bigger than David Kirkbride who has a riot as the cocksure but hapless Armado, purveyor of flowery, unrequited love letters and ‘herbal’ pills - both of which end up in the hands of Johnson’s somewhat dim lifeguard lothario Gary Costard.
Kirkbride is given a run for his money by Lucas, Cotran and Johnson as the equally hapless stags who fetch up at the resort’s end-of-season fiesta in full Cher drag, Ferdy hoping to win round Annie Kirkman’s Yvette and Berowne to win the heart of Alyce Liburd’s Rosie.
As you may have surmised, it’s not exactly subtle – there’s much thrusting of groins, some cartoonish characterisation and a running toilet gag - and it’s also a tad on the long side (the text could probably weather a 10-to-15-minute trim).
But this Shakespeare North/Stephen Joseph Theatre co-production is also well staged, nicely lit, fearlessly frolicsome and unashamedly entertaining.
And if Shakespeare scholars might sniff at some of the liberty taking, I suspect its style of storytelling would have also greatly appealed to contemporary theatregoers in the pit at the Rose, Swan and Globe – and indeed at Prescot’s own playhouse.