London Free Press, August 22, 2003
Where's the love?
By: Noel Gallagher
Before Love's Labour's Lost opens, a huge, elaborate push-cart sits alone on the Festival Theatre stage.
It's piled high with a clutter of gadgets and imaginative junk, an eye-catching diversion that doesn't have a real function or serve any significant purpose.
It's an ideal metaphor for Stratford's highly amusing version of Shakespeare's essentially hollow romantic comedy.
Director Antoni Cimolino and company accentuate the fun-loving spirit that fuels Love's Labour's Lost, one of the Bard's happiest, though least meaningful works.
Its script hinges on an improbable premise: King Ferdinand of Navarre (Shane Carty) and a trio of his noblemen vow to avoid contact with women for three years, in order to concentrate on their college studies. Their celibacy oaths appear doomed when the Princess of France (Dana Green) arrives with a bevy of beauties determined to best the four fools in a battle of the sexes.
The two factions engage in a series of nonsensical activities - a botched delivery of love letters, mistaken identites, manipulative courtship games, and a masquerade party - in which style outstrips substance.
Zany performances quickly become the priority in this light-headed vehicle.
They are led by Brian Bedford as Don Adriano de Armado.
The dim dandy is an aging gaudily attired Spanish eccentric whose specialty is mangling the English language: "It is the posterior of the day, what you call 'the afternoon.'" Another festival favourite, James Blendick, is cast as the wily French courtier Boyet, who harvests much of the humour.
Likewise, effective funny business is produced by Pericles' star Jonathan Goad, as Costard, the low-born master of hijinks; impressive newcomer Jacob James, who portrays young Moth, and Stratford veteran Brian Tree as smug schoolteacher Holofernes who fancies himself a wordplay expert.
He has plenty of rivals in that department, since this play launches an endless barrage of verbal jousting, barbed witticisms and intricate puns.
The plot's main romance, linking Berowne and Rosaline, is nicely drawn by Graham Abbey and Michelle Giroux, but love is next to irrelevant in this comedy that disdains Cupid as "the giant dwarf".
This Love's Labour's Lost prefers to be a tale told by a witty idiot, full of sound and fun but signifying very little.