In this play, which all the editors have concurred to censure and some have rejected as unworthy of our poet, it must be confessed that there are many passages mean, childish, and vulgar; and some which ought not to have been exhibited, as we are told they were, to a maiden queen. But there are scattered through the whole many sparks of genius; nor is there any play that has more evident marks of the hand of Shakespeare.3
It was not until 1839 that the play returned to the London stage, when the opera star Lucia Elizabeth Vestris and her husband, Charles James Mathews, inaugurated their management of Covent Garden with a spectacular production designed in collaboration with James Robinson Planché. Madame Vestris played Rosaline. Although a critical success, the riots that followed the closure of the theater’s shilling gallery brought its run to an end after only nine performances.
Samuel Phelps finally mounted a successful production at Sadler’s Wells in 1857. Set in a picturesque medieval court with painted backdrops of “wooded landscapes,” it won critical acclaim. Phelps, who played Don Armado, was generally praised for his intelligent ensemble approach and his attention to detail. The play itself was finally rehabilitated: John Oxenford, in his review for The Times, commented that he thought the play one “over which a great deal of good acting may be diffused, for even the smallest parts are marked characters and some of them very strongly and very strangely defined.… [Mr. Phelps] has so well applied the talent of his company that there is not a single weakly acted part.”4 His promptbook continued in use into the twentieth century. It was presented at the Old Vic in 1918, 1923, and 1928.
Augustin Daly directed a production in New York in 1891. The New York Times praised the acting and especially commended the set: “Indeed, no handsomer setting of a play by Shakespeare was ever seen in this country—or in any other probably. Every picture is a noble example of the scene painter’s art.”5 There were Stratford-upon-Avon productions in 1885, 1907, 1925, and 1934. Meanwhile Barry Jackson directed a production at the Birmingham Rep in 1919, revived in 1925.
It was Tyrone Guthrie’s 1932 production at the Westminster Theatre, London, however, which marks the turn in the play’s theatrical fortunes. Using a heavily cut text and a single set, it was played at top speed with great verve, lasting an astonishing ninety minutes. Gordon Crosse describes how precisely the set and the actors’ movements were controlled: “with the king’s pavilion draped in red on one side and the Princess’s in green on the other, each group of characters dressed in the corresponding color and keeping strictly to its own side in all entrances and exits.”6 The production was re-staged at the Old Vic in 1936, but the color scheme softened with costumes in pastel shades of pink, green, and cream against an uncluttered set consisting of only a fountain, two tents on either side of the stage, and a wrought iron gate, topped by an arc of fresh leaves, that led into the domain of Navarre. The critic John Dover Wilson described the dramatic effect seeing this production had on his perception of the play: “Mr. Guthrie not only gave me a new play, the existence of which I had never suspected, which indeed had been veiled from men’s eyes for three centuries, but he set me at a fresh standpoint of understanding and appreciation from which the whole of Shakespearian comedy might be reviewed in a new light.” Crucially, Guthrie replaced the grand finales that had characterized the earlier productions of Vestris and Phelps:
The extraordinary impression left upon the audience by the entrance of the black-clad messenger upon the court revels was the greatest lesson I took away with me from the Guthrie production. It made me see two things—(a) that however gay, however riotous a Shakespearian comedy, tragedy is always there, felt, if not seen; (b) that for all its surface lightness and frivolity, the play had behind it a serious mind at work, with a purpose.7
This emphasis on the play’s darker elements was to be realized most fully in Peter Brook’s 1946 production at Stratford. Still in the shadow of the Second World War, the twenty-year-old Brook made his professional debut with this production. He recalled the rehearsal process in detail in his book The Empty Space (1968). He emphasized the play’s painterly qualities by means of a set and costumes that drew on Antoine Watteau’s eighteenth-century “fête champêtre” paintings, with their sense of a gilded age tempered by a play of light and dark. The production was an unqualified success and established Brook’s professional reputation. According to The Times (London),
His presentment of the play as a masque of youthful affectations shows a remarkably complete grasp of its somewhat elusive values, and is, from first to last, consistent with itself. He has given its movement on the stage a puffball lightness, handled the chiaroscuro with delicate, imaginative expertness, and once or twice succeeds in fading out a scene in such a way that color and grouping heighten its significance.8
Locating the production within the historical context of work at the Stratford Memorial Theatre, theater historian Sally Beauman argued that the adjective “Watteau-esque” most usually applied to the production might work as an “interesting correlative for the aristocratic young lovers, journeying from illusion and artifice to greater maturity,” but was inadequate when applied to other characters:
The production teemed with ideas that owed nothing to Watteau. The Princess was accompanied by a chalk-faced commedia dell’arte clown, who never spoke; Constable Dull was a Punch-and-Judy policeman with a truncheon and a string of sausages; Armado was a sixteenth-century grandee whom Velazquez might have painted. The play began with insolent aplomb by confronting the audience with a gigantic drop on which was painted a great barred gate and the words of the King of Navarre’s proclamation banning women, writ large like a song-scroll in a pantomime. The production was far more heretic, rag-bag, and anarchic than the adjective “Watteau-esque” conveys. It was played fast, except for the famous long silence that greeted that messenger of death, Mercadé; it had a delight in artifice as great as that of any of the characters, and it was funny, belying the play’s reputation for difficult-to-comprehend jokes.9
2. Paul Scofield as Don Armado in Peter Brook’s landmark 1946 production. How does humankind overcome “devouring time”? Through “fame” or philosophical study or love? Shakespeare meditates deeply on this question not only in the play, but also in his Sonnets, which he seems to have begun writing around the same time.
A few years later, there was another highly successful production in London. Hugh Hunt’s 1949 staging was the greatest success of the Old Vic season. The reviewer Lionel Hale described how in his view the director had
put exactly the right movement into the play: it skates charmingly over the thin ice of the glittering words: and it is decorated throughout with a full invention but without any infuriating fuss. Mr. Berkeley Sutcliffe’s settings—lakes, summer houses, gay pavilions, and overhanging trees in the manner of an Elizabethan miniaturist—catch all the lyric quality of this “April comedy.” His costumes have a sheen, a rich shimmer. He and Mr. Hunt have worked rarely to make a success even of the scene when the King and his courtiers arrive disguised as Muscovites: they have seen it as a picture. And, when we come to the “elegiac close,” they have … made it a thing of pure enchantment.10
Despite the success of such productions, the play is still performed less frequently than most of Shakespeare’s plays. Most of the revivals in recent years have been staged by the Royal Shakespeare Company. These are discussed below in greater detail. In 1968 Laurence Olivier directed a production at the National Theatre in London, which critics complained lacked the vitality of earlier productions. Critic Helen Dawson thought the set, which had been much admired, problematic: “The trees in the royal park may float rather captivatingly, but otherwise they are merely props in a chocolate box fairy glade. The décor, like the production, lacks the delicate shading of menace to hint at the darkness beneath the sparkling surface.”11 London Times reviewer Irving Wardle thought the “sumptuous blaze of Renaissance costumes” responsible for the slow pace of the production since it hampered the ac
tors’ movements, but he was mainly critical of the final scene: “It is only in the great scene of Mercadé’s announcement of the King’s death that the production falters. It is equal to the fantasy and the games, but not to the fact of death from which it turns away in favour of a Christmas card ending.”12
3. Painterly set and Elizabethan costume: the Old Vic production of 1949.
Critic and theater director Charles Marowitz was more caustic, calling it “slow-footed” and “sugar-coated,” “a production that preens and cosmeticizes a play which can only work today if wrung firmly by the neck.” He went on to argue that it failed to make itself relevant to the times:
A play that concerns the sensual distractions of a band of men devoted to the rigors of scholarship would seem to be thumpingly appropriate in the late 1960s, but in opting for artifice and elegance, Olivier has sealed the play off from contemporary resonance. One is left with a lot of fussy staging, eccentric vocalism, and a Christmas-card finale which forcibly brings back the festering Old Vic days of the 1950s when Shakespeare was conceived entirely in terms of fudge sundaes and whipped cream.13
Successful productions have usually recognized the need to update the play, to transpose period and setting to give it a contemporary edge for modern audiences. The American Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Connecticut, staged a production in 1968 directed by Michael Kahn that deliberately set out to satirize 1960s popular culture. The four young aristocrats from Navarre became
versions of the Beatles, especially since they were pursued by teenyboppers and camera-flashing reporters as they arrived for the first scene. Like the Beatles, they escaped the modern world to go to India/Navarre where the long-haired and full-bearded King, accompanied by incense-bearers and a sitar player, wore a long white robe and, though noticeably younger than the Maharishi, obviously alluded to that cult figure.14
Kahn believed that “presenting the play in a contemporary setting created a world that was simultaneously glamorous and yet easy to make fun of,” a world in which the satire of “trendiness of language and feeling” would be immediately recognizable. The 2006 revival of this production included in the RSC’s Complete Works Festival testified to its continuing vitality.
Karel Kriz staged a radical, innovative production at the National Theatre in Prague in 1987 in which the “dominant element on stage was an ornate fire curtain.”15 In 1989 Gerald Freedman directed Love’s Labor’s Lost as part of Joseph Papp’s ambitious series of productions of Shakespeare in New York’s Central Park. Freedman set his play in the 1930s, an era, he believed, “when appearance was all,” and used “a row of confetti-like strips of colored paper for a curtain to suggest the festive nature of the goings-on.”16 Trevor Nunn concluded his period as Artistic Director of Britain’s National Theatre in 2003 with a production set in the early twentieth century: “Nunn’s most striking concept is to set this Love’s Labour’s Lost as a dream sequence on the battlefields of the First World War. Men about to die horribly are given a brief glimpse of the love they will never know.”17
4. Transposition to the counterculture: Michael Kahn’s revival of his 1960s production, played by the Shakespeare Theatre Company of Washington, D.C., during the RSC’s Complete Works Festival (2006).
The 1930s was the setting for Kenneth Branagh’s film musical adaptation of 2000. Sympathetic to the concept, most critics found its realization incomplete: “The project was a promising possibility, not an instant sacrilege. The trouble is that the promise was not well-kept.”18 As A. O. Scott suggested in the New York Times,
There is no doubting Mr. Branagh’s sincere enthusiasm for the material, which is not only Shakespeare but also old newsreels, Casablanca and classic MGM musicals. He throws them together with the gusto of a man playing a tuba with a bass drum strapped to his back while his pet monkey leaps around with a squeeze box. It’s not art exactly, or even music, but it’s entertaining, albeit in an intermittently annoying kind of way19
AT THE RSC
Designing Navarre
“Staging a play in which Coleridge found ‘little to interest as a dramatic representation’ and which Dr. Johnson thought ‘childish and vulgar’ can be a stiff task,” began one reviewer in response to Terry Hands’ RSC production of 1990.20 Yet with its masques and pageant, and the awakening of the young men to the realities of love, the play offers itself to a very modern, even postmodern, self-conscious exploration of artifice and performance—both onstage in the action of the play, and in the theater between the real audience and the actors.
Some directors and designers have begun from the (unsubstantiated) conjecture that the play might have been written “for open air performance in a nobleman’s garden.”21 They have accordingly taken the opportunity to look at different types of acting space in a beautifully scenic but stylized way. Many have opted for set designs that, either through their painterly quality or their attempt to mimic reality, have emphasized the artificial nature of the world the young men inhabit. Irving Wardle in The Times (London), writing about the 1973 David Jones production, explained how Timothy O’Brien and Tazeena Firth’s set design consisted of
a grassy floor with a pair of pole-like trees pushing upwards through a green canopy. The canopy is the main feature of the set: raked downwards to the back wall it forms a silken roof overprinted with magnified leaf photographs. Beautiful to look at, this also supplies a perfect visual metaphor for the play itself, which equally shows nature appearing through an artefact.22
One reason for the play’s revived success on the stage is the almost artificial nostalgia or fairy-tale quality to this refuge for love, which for most of the play remains untouched by the cares of the real world. Populated with “endearing rustics and academics who seem to be smiling out of an old-fashioned children’s book,”23 the escapist quality of the play is part of its attraction. The design of the 1965 production directed by John Barton offered a reminder of reality in the lighting created by John Bradley, which illuminated the action as if it took place in a single day. This worked in juxtaposition to the highly stylized set:
The Sleeping Beauty-like wooded background of Sally Jacobs’ set is dappled with bright morning sunshine in the early scenes, with the longer shadows of the afternoon following—both to be finally eclipsed by nightfall which, appropriately enough, coincides with the announcement of the French king’s death and the play’s consequent abrupt and final shift of mood.24
With its box hedges and coutured costumes, the design suggested the garden architecture and formal dress of an aristocratic country house in a world dominated by artifice. The pretensions of the young men, and their attempt to avoid the real world, were played out in a leafy idyll, shattered only by the inescapable reality of Death. In the words of the review in the Financial Times,
The King of Navarre’s Court has put on black to signalise its withdrawal from pleasure and its three-year dedication to abstinence and study; and the trees in the King’s park … have turned black to match, and gloom over the revels in a rather forbidding way. The Court removes its mourning dress once the oaths of the courtiers have been broken; the trees are denied this privilege.… There isn’t very much sparkle about King Ferdinand’s Court. The King and his chums get the lion’s share of such good poetry as there is in the play, but their sombre clothes seem to have reacted on their mood, and they revel, jest and make love in rather a subdued frame of mind.25
In 1973, Irving Wardle in The Times praised director David Jones for turning “the play’s stylistic artifice to dramatic advantage”:
From its opening mock-funeral procession—where the four votaries cast their gay clothes into an empty coffin—the production develops under the shadow of death. A joke to begin with, it imposes its lasting separation in the final scene, just as sex, begun as a holiday game, enmeshes them in harsh responsibilities.26
The onset of darker days is not always so blatantly advertised. Most productions opt for a softer, more autumnal feel—the stage often bein
g littered with fallen leaves, as in John Barton’s second production, played in 1978 and described in Shakespeare Survey:
Enormous boughs of cascading autumnal leaves entirely enclosing a raked wooden forestage, behind which seats and a leaf-strewn floor suggested distant parkland. But there was no external glamour about the two courts, which seemed humbler, less formal, than usual: the lords took their oaths with little ceremony on a rustic seat; Rosaline cleaned the Princess’s travelling boots and the travel-stained hem of her skirt in their first scene, and swept up autumn leaves with a broom in the last; the King and the Princess, especially, were very unelaborated, untidy even, in appearance, ordinary human beings rather than heads of state, especially when they first met, a rather endearing, unimpressive, bespectacled pair: a long silence indicated sudden (to them embarrassing) mutual attraction.27
Barton’s production was favorably received by audiences and critics alike, but some others in a similar vein have been less so: there is a risk of overlaboring the elegiac point. As the theater historian Russell Jackson points out,
Directors and (especially) designers who take their cue from the wistfulness of the ending are in danger of sentimentalising the whole performance. The autumnal languor that sometimes bathes productions of the play—in anticipation of the final scene—can work against the comedy itself. Directors sometimes use the quizzical and pathetic element in the endings of Shakespearean comedy as a pretext for being wise not merely after but during and (in the souvenir programmes) before the event.28
5. Stage design assisting the comedy of deception and overhearing: Roger Rees as Berowne and Josette Simon as Rosaline in Barry Kyle’s 1984 RSC production.
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