The Globe and Mail, August 22, 2003
Bard's labour's lost, then won
By: Kate Taylor
(**1/2) One of Shakespeare's early plays, Love's Labour's Lost is none too complicated. The King of Navarre and his lords have just agreed to sequester themselves for three years of study, eschewing food, sleep and women when the charming Princess of France and her lovely ladies arrive in their midst on a diplomatic mission.
To successfully stage the inevitable collapse of the men's vows, a director doesn't need any grand vision - just a cast than can do justice to the play's poetic flights of fancy and raise real laughs from its comedy. And, with some notable exceptions, that is what director Antoni Cimolino has got as he offers an enthusiastic if erratic production on the main stage of the Stratford Festival.
Cimolino chooses the great epoch of French wit as his setting and so Broadway and film designer Santo Loquasto makes his Stratford debut with a parade of luscious 18th century costumes. Underneath those panniers and britches, there is a lively octet of lovers, lead by particularly winning work from Graham Abbey and Michelle Giroux as Berowne and Rosaline. He amusingly articulates Berowne's mischievous personality and saucy tongue, his reluctant conversion to love and his hypocritical but heartfelt outrage when his companions fall too. Giroux looks like something painted by Gainsborough and if her sharp comic angles can seem merely mannered in some settings, here she brings a refreshingly funny hauteur to Rosaline's wicked wit.
They are solidly supported by Dana Green's lusty Princess of France, James Blendick's impish version of her courtier Boyet and Shane Carty's ever so slightly nerdy Ferdinand of Navarre. Carty gently plays the king as a rather reluctant leader and sheepish lover, raising the notion that his initial desire to withdraw from the world may suit his emotional character as much as his intellectual requirements.
At the other end of the social spectrum, there's a satifying earthiness on offer from Jonathan Goad and Adrienne Gould as Costard and Jaquenetta, the rustic pair who are the first to break that unenforceable ban on intergender relations. But then we arrive at the sad fact of Brian Beford's performance as Don Adriano de Armado, the ludicrously pretentious Spanish nobleman who falls in love with Jaquenetta.
Perhaps Bedford, who made his entrance at Wednesday's opening to the kind of applause that greets an audience favourite, is enjoying too much acclaim for his current work in Present Laughter over at the Avon Theatre to bother concerning himself with a stock role in a late-season opener. Whatever the reason for this unfunny and unimaginative Don Adriano, he appears dressed by Loquasto as some kind of superannuated Don Quixote and delivers comedy as dusty as his costume in an accent that wanders across Europe, creating a gaping hole in the fabric of the first half.
His younger colleagues then rescue the show with some work that is as vivid as his is dead. The scene in which the four men discover that each one has broke his vow and is now composing love letters to one of the French ladies is beautifully detailed, richly full of outraged expostulations and sarcastic reactions as one by one the men are confronted with their breach.
With Carty and Abbey backed by Caleb Marshall's Dumain and Stephen Gartner's Longaville, their performances make the characters wonderfully contemporary figures of youth, animated by touchingly familiar humour and pretences.
This scene largely resolves the play - the men will woo; the ladies will be won - and the acts that follow are comic set pieces that lack dramatic tension. A production can only sustain interest here if these are hilarious and Cimolino doesn't pull that off. The scene where the men appear to the ladies disguised as Moscovites is inevitably silly rather than funny. For the pageant of nine worthies presented by Costard and Don Adriano, Loquasto falls into the old Stratford trap of trying to generate laughs through over-costuming. Cimolino, meanwhile, cannot resolve how to address the nastiness of this spectacle in which the aristocrats mock the rubes' attempts at entertainment.
Now, Bedford belatedly makes some effort and brings a quiet warning note to Don Adriano's humiliation. And then Cimolino very effectively establishes the bittersweet atmosphere that ends the play as the lord and ladies, agreeing to part for a year, seeks some realistic middle ground between the pretensions of scholarly renunciation and those of love poetry. It's a bumpy ride, but this Love's Labour's Lost does get there in the end.