Review of The RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Won


 

I attended Love’s Labour’s Won, also known as Much Ado About Nothing, about a week ago. I saw the RSC’s Love’s Labour’s Lost last month, and whilst finding the acting, costume, lighting and set design exemplary, I found the conclusion of the play where the male characters, i.e., the Prince and his fellow scholars, return to the stage in First World War army officers’ uniforms gratuitous and slightly distasteful as it is irrelevant to the plot. I stated in my blog review of the play (follow the link here to read it: http://amyeholley.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/the-rscsproduction-of-shakespeares.html) that it felt as though the directorial team had forgotten in their 2013 planning meeting that 2014 is the centenary of World War One and had decided to ram WWI elements into the play. For me, this cheapens the heroic efforts of the soldiers, sailors, other serving officers and the people whose lives were shaped by the war, but from looking at other reviews of the play by The Telegraph (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/11167470/Loves-Labours-LostLoves-Labours-Won-Royal-Shakespeare-Theatre-review.html ), Financial Times (http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0f0daf56-5598-11e4-b750-00144feab7de.html#axzz3JAfCfGoe) and The Independent (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/whatever-happened-to-lost-work-loves-labours-won-with-their-new-pairing-of-plays-the-royal-shakespeare-company-might-have-the-answer-9787888.html), amongst others, the First World War ending of Love’s Labour’s Lost is not considered jarring. The WWI elements are generally considered to be ‘poignant’ or ‘emotional’. But if we look at the plot of Love’s Labour’s Lost, it ends with the Princess of France informing Ferdinand, King of Navarre, that she will not agree to marry him until they have both spent twelve months in solitude; her mourning the recent death of her father whilst Ferdinand helps the sick and continues his studies. The Princess’s soliloquy is copied below from Act 5: Scene 2:

No, no, my lord, your grace is perjured much,
Full of dear guiltiness; and therefore this:
If for my love, as there is no such cause,
You will do aught, this shall you do for me:
Your oath I will not trust; but go with speed
To some forlorn and naked hermitage,
Remote from all the pleasures of the world;
There stay until the twelve celestial signs
Have brought about the annual reckoning.
If this austere insociable life
Change not your offer made in heat of blood;
If frosts and fasts, hard lodging and thin weeds
Nip not the gaudy blossoms of your love,
But that it bear this trial and last love;
Then, at the expiration of the year,
Come challenge me, challenge me by these deserts,
And, by this virgin palm now kissing thine
I will be thine; and till that instant shut
My woeful self up in a mourning house,
Raining the tears of lamentation
For the remembrance of my father's death.
If this thou do deny, let our hands part,
Neither entitled in the other's heart.

 

Ferdinand and his fellow scholars, including Berowne, leave the stage agreeing to a twelve month absence from their paramours:

 

FERDINAND

Come, sir, it wants a twelvemonth and a day,
And then 'twill end.

 

BEROWNE

That's too long for a play.

 

As evident from these examples (feel free to read through and check!) there is no mention of war at the end of the play at all. Whilst I am fully aware that one of the joys of Shakespeare’s plays is its universal themes; themes which make it relevant to audiences five hundred years after they were written, and that adaptation can completely transform a text, i.e., from a novel into a play, a poem into a play, a song into a painting, etc. An adaptation still needs to be done artfully, tactfully and with consideration to the original source and the point and place in time to which it is being resituated. If this is not done, at what point does an adaptation stop being an adaptation from an original source and becomes an independent work inspired by a source, if that happens does it have the right to retain the original source’s name or should it consider a new title?

As I have previously said, for me The RSC’s production Love’s Labour’s Lost did not accomplish an elegant transformation to the outbreak of World War One in Britain. I, therefore, attended the advertised sequel to Love’s Labour’ Lost, Love’s Labour’s Won (most commonly known as Much Ado About Nothing) with some trepidation, however knowing that Love’s Labour’s Won aka Much Ado About Nothing starts with soldiers returning from being away at war. I need not have worried. Christopher Luscombe’s production mastered the art of adaptation but it was helped enormously by the fact that Love’s Labour’s Won starts with men returning from war, therefore it was ripe for adaptation to the conclusion of World War One or Two, or to a place seeing the return of serving men from any war. Love’s Labour’s Lost, however, does not contain enough of the crucial elements required to make the jump to July 1914 work. In addition to being an easier transition to the Great War, this production succeeds on many other levels.

 

Luscombe was challenged with directing both plays as there is some dispute in academic circles regarding whether Love’s Labour’s Won is a sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost and by producing them simultaneously with the same cast, Luscombe was attempting to investigate, on Gregory Doran’s request, whether they are part of the same narrative. The feeling of both Doran and Luscombe is that they are linked but Luscombe, somewhat revealingly for me, states that he “encouraged [the actors] to think of them as separate. It’s for the audience to enjoy the arc, more than the actors” (http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/features/whatever-happened-to-lost-work-loves-labours-won-with-their-new-pairing-of-plays-the-royal-shakespeare-company-might-have-the-answer-9787888.htm ). I believe that the plays are linked by their common genre, i.e., romantic comedy, and the themes of the romantic hunt or chase, and deception or false identities, as the characters and the time differ so much between the plays. Whether the plays were intentionally linked by Shakespeare is a question we may never answer. As such, viewing productions of both plays can only boil down to how well they have been adapted and how well they have been performed, set, lit and staged.

 

Love’s Labour’s Won was extremely well performed, as was Love’s Labour’s Lost. The cast was the same in both plays and the actors played similar roles in each. Nick Haverson taking on comedic roles as Costard in Love’s Labour’s Lost and a bumbling constable Dogberry. Edward Bennett appears as Berowne and then Benedick and Michelle Terry as Rosaline and then Beatrice. This encouraged the audience’s view of the plays as a pair despite the fact the Luscombe states that he encouraged the actors to view the plays as separate. The set for Love’s Labour’s Won combined Edwardian Downton Abbey style glamour with all of the best technological features of a wealthy modern theatre.

 

 

 Audience marvelling at the set pre-show

There are some excellent examples of comedic action in Love’s Labour’s Won, particularly the scene where Benedick overhears Don Pedro and his men talking about Beatrice’s love for him. Benedick is hidden inside a Christmas tree in Luscombe’s production where Edward Bennett appears to climb and jump from branch to branch inside the tree as he desperately tries to hear more of Don Pedro’s supposedly confidential conversation heightening the already amusing language. Nick Haverson as Dogberry is equally amusing in the scene where Dogberry has apprehended Borachio, who has had an amorous liaison with Margaret, Hero’s chambermaid, but has been plotting with Don John to pass off his liaison as having been with Hero in order to destroy her reputation so that Claudio refuses to marry her. Haverson masters comedic business and slapstick in this scene.

 

All in all, Luscombe’s Love’s Labour’s Won production succeeds where Love’s Labour’s Lost failed to reach maximum impact. However above all, Luscombe and Doran succeed in pairing the two plays together to examine whether they were designed to be linked when first written. They are now so associated with one another that the reviews for the productions are not for each individual play but are reviews for the two in parallel with one another. They are considered by the audience as a shared narrative whether or not this was the author’s intention.  The previously most known title of Much Ado About Nothing for Love’s Labour’s Won has been set to the wayside in favour of promoting the view of plays as being two parts of one story making a very interesting spectacle. The addition of commemorating the centenary makes the plays even more interesting when looking at adaptation theory and drama.

 

One to watch with your thinking caps on, despite the romcom tag it’s advertised with!