|  LOVE’S
LABOUR’S LOST
by William Shakespeare
Bard on the Beach
June 15-Sept. 24
$16.00-$28.50
604-739-0559
www.bardonthebeach.org
Okay, I have to lay my cards on the table. I just don’t
get this play or why Bard on the Beach needs to do it again so
soon after its 1997 production. One of Shakespeare’s earliest
comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost is also his most formal,
rhetorical and least funny. The Novice Playwright Who Would Later
Become the Bard plays Mr. Showoff here and is hoist on his own
petard.
To satirize the folly of pedantry in love and language,
he has his characters speak in clunky rhyme, read three long
letters
(what could be less dramatically interesting?), recite four bad
poems and ridiculous Latinate prose. After almost three hours,
skeptic-turned-lover Berowne finally forswears “figures
pedantical” and “maggot ostentation” to woo
Rosaline straightforwardly, but by then it’s too late for
me.
The plot concerns the King of Navarre (Tobias Slezak) and his
Lords Berowne (David Mackay), Longaville (Todd Thomson) and Dumaine
(David Beazely), who vow to devote themselves to study for three
years and never see a woman. That lasts about ten minutes until
the Princess of France (Kerry Sandomirsky) comes along with her
three Ladies, Rosaline (Jennifer Lines), Maria (Karen Rae) and
Katherine (Lara Gilchrist). Each falls in love with each, various
battles of wits ensue, and Shakespeare pulls an interesting switcheroo
at the end.
The major secondary characters underline the message that the
brain is no substitute for the heart. Don Armado (Gerry Mackay),
a stage-Spanish soldier in love with peasant girl Jaquenetta
(Rebecca Auerbach), translates his feelings into long, fractured
English passages of overblown, affected metaphor. Schoolmaster
Holofernes (Christopher Weddell) speechifies at great length
about Latin definitions and rhetorical devices. Both talented
actors work very hard to make this stuff funny, but for the most
part their labours are lost.
Not all is lost, though, David Mackay and Scott Bellis, terrific
in As You Like It, also shine here. Mackay finds all the grace
notes in Berowne’s lover’s soliloquy, and his hypocritical
lecturing of his friends about their hypocrisy in love is very
funny. Bellis makes the doddering, pipe-sucking Dull the play’s
least dull character with wonderful minimalist comic acting.
Jennifer Lines’ Rosaline does good work twisting Berowne
into knots, though the women don’t get a lot of quality
stage time. Christopher Gaze as comic aristocrat Boyet and Allan
Zinyk as comic peasant Costard both have their moments. All the
lords and ladies look gorgeous in costumer Mara Gottler’s
elegant black and white dresses and beautiful morning suits.
The most entertaining scene in Michael Shamata’s production
is the lively, absurd Russian dance, cleverly choreographed by
Valerie Easton, done by the guys who come disguised as “Muscovites” to
court the gals, who mask themselves to confuse their would-be
lovers. Watching the masked actresses navigate the set’s
stairs in gowns trailing long trains, though, is scary!
What does it say when the best things in a Shakespeare play
are a Russian dance and a character named Dull?
Jerry Wasserman |
