Love's Labour's Lost (Globe Theatre Version) (2010 Video) User Reviews

Labour of love

[TheLittleSongbird · 8/10 · 24 June 2022]

'Love's Labour's Lost' is not one of "The Bard" William Shakespeare's best or most accessible plays despite being one of Shakespeare's shortest. Mostly for all that wordplay and dialogue, difficult to remember and not always easy to follow. It is a lot of fun to watch though and one of the most striking aspects of it is the very meaty character of Berowne. So it does deserve to be better known like many of Shakespeare's lesser known plays.

This production from Shakespeare Globe is proof that 'Love's Labour's Lost' should be better known and deserves to be. It is not always easy making such a wordy and sprawling play accessible, entertaining and emotionally impactful. But all three are accomplished absolutely brilliantly here and the production just flies by with very few bumps. It may not be one of the best filmed Shakespeare Globe productions, but it is still a very solid representation of why it deserves its reputation as one of the leading Shakespeare companies.

So much works wonderfully here. The production has a lot of atmosphere visually and is very tasteful and like being there at the time watching it first time. Which is enhanced by the intimate video directing, where so much entertainment value is garnered looking at the audience reactions. Also enhancing the production is the absolutely beautiful music score. Just loved the song in the closing scene.

Also liked the stage direction very much. It is very creative while always being very respectful to the text and the drama, a great job is done making the drama easy to follow and always engaging. A big standout being one of the most creatively choreographed and fun to watch interpretations of the brawls seen anywhere. The comedic moments are played to the hilt and suitably broad (had no problem with it being treated as a farce), also not played too safe, yet the production also doesn't forget to bring out the heart of the play and doesn't miss the point of it. The ending is touching and isn't too civilized.

On the most part the performances are excellent, especially from the complex Berowne of Trystan Graville and Seroca Davis as a scene stealing Moth. The characters that could easily be overacted and too much like caricatures are played very well and are not annoying.

Really did wish though that the female roles were on the male cast's level, but they don't match their complexity or maturity and don't seem as sure of what the play is meant to be or the approach the production was going for judging from the histrionic acting style. Michelle Terry actually is a gifted Shakespearean actress, but the personality is bland (which shines in meatier roles like Beatrice from 'Much Ado About Nothing') and there are other times where she over-compensates. Only in her final scene is she in keeping with everything else going on.

In conclusion though, very impressive indeed. 8/10.

Love's Labour's Lost--the Globe version

[Red-125 · 8/10 · 22 September 2015]

Love's Labour's Lost (Globe Theatre Version) (2010) (V) was directed by Dominic Dromgoole. (For some reason, the director isn't listed by IMDb.) LLL isn't one of Shakespeare's great comedies. There are four intertwined subplots. One involves the King of Navarre and three of his young courtiers/companions, and the Princess of France and three of her ladies-in-waiting/companions. Another involves a stereotypical Spanish nobleman and his love for a country lass. A third involves the same country lass, who may or may not be in love with a country lad (The lad wanders in and out of all the plots.) The fourth plot involves three bourgeois officials--the preacher, the teacher, and the constable. There's also a major role for Moth, the witty servant to Don Armado, the Spaniard. To add to this there are men disguised as "Muscovites," mistaken identities, and a pageant performed by the three bourgeois men.

Surprisingly, Love's Labour's Lost is loaded with wordplay. There are endless puns, endless poems, and endless commentary about puns, poems, and words. Shakespeare was warming up. Knowing what we know now, we can sense the genius flexing his mental and verbal muscles-- warming up for Much Ado About Nothing and Midsummer Night's Dream.

Anyone putting on this play has to deal with a weak premise and an intricate--and not very funny--plot. The BBC series played it straight. This is Shakespeare's play, and we're going to perform it as he wrote it. If it's not a great play, that's not our fault.

The Globe version, on the other hand, appeared to be aimed at high school students, and they went for slapstick. During the intermission, the cast came out and mingled with the audience, threw candy to them, and basically said, "Look--Shakespeare can be fun." I'm not criticizing this approach. For all I know this is closer to what Shakespeare's audience saw than the BBC approach. However, if you're looking for a serious production, this one isn't for you.

I rarely single out an actor for criticism, but I have to make an exception in this case. Michelle Terry is miscast as the Princess of France. The Princess of France isn't an untutored girl. She has come to Navarre on an important political mission, and everyone accepts her as someone who could fulfill a diplomatic role. There's nothing regal about Michelle Terry. She would be better cast as Jaquenetta, the country lass. Ms. Terry may be the right actor for the right role, but she's the wrong actor for this role. However, the other cast members were excellent, especially Seroca Davis as Moth.

We saw this movie on DVD. It would probably work better on a large screen. (It would work even better at The Globe, or at Stratford, Ontario, where we saw it in 2015.) Still, if you want an antic version of LLL, this is the one to watch. I enjoyed it.

Royal Hide and Seek

[Dr_Coulardeau · 9/10 · 30 January 2020]

This production is extremely faithful to Shakespeare's text, though of course not to his own production since he had no female actors and used male teenagers for female parts, and female parts are essential in this play. In fact, this production is even cheating slightly with Moth, Don Armado's page, by having him impersonated by a woman. True enough it is a difficult part, but I am sure they could have found a competent young actor, and what's more, small in size. Moth is supposed to be fifteen or sixteen, with no hair on his face. The exchange between Armado and Moth at the beginning is slightly made fake since Moth is no longer a "tender juvenal" though Armado is definitely a "tough senior." In Shakespeare's production, they would have five more tender juvenals for the Princess, her ladies, and Jaquenetta. We lost these tender juvenals played here by women, but we should have kept one and I must say a young actor looking as if he were sixteen would have been a lot more impressive since a lot of innuendo goes along with this Moth who is going to play Hercules in his childhood or nearly, killing some snake in his cradle. Moth in very light clothing, nearly naked actually the way he is represented in so many statues would have been a lot more impressive. I must admit I found his violent apparition with some kind of a soft stone club weapon looked rather innocuous and silly, and the snake being so slender looked even rather banal. It is obvious Moth could not play on his teenage looks to impersonate a child and it probably would have been better to be able to play on that and then the snake could have been some monstrous thing not a piece of string, or isn't it a piece of rope?

But the noble courtiers and the King are young, more or less as they should be - at least today - and the Princess and her noble ladies are also more or less young, at least as they should be today. We seem to forget that in Shakespearean times marriage for a girl was normally around 13, and there could be some waivers to go down to 11. The marriage laws of the 18th century confirmed such a fact, which meant it was not entirely respected before and some marriages must have concerned very young girls. We find it difficult today to be realistic about such things. A mature woman was around 20 at the latest and the mature woman of 30 only appeared in the 19th century. Think of Honoré de Balzac and his The Thirty-Year-Old Woman.

But on the other side, this production is extremely better than most because of the setting, or rather the absence of any specific setting since it mostly takes place outside the court and the scenes inside are mostly set in the library of the King's residence, a castle or a mansion. But that is because it was produced for the Globe Theater in London which is supposed to be a real, or at least as close as possible to a real Shakespearean theater, in fact, a reconstructed original Globe Theater that burnt and brought Shakespeare to the end of his career as a playwright, moving back to his family in Stratford-Upon-Avon. The setting is the vast space in front of a house façade with a built-in canopy supported by two majestic pillars, and with an open sky over it, and surrounded by various galleries. I remember seeing a performance of a play by Shakespeare in what was an approximate acceptable built-in environment in the early 1960s: it was the back yard of an old inn and the stage was mostly the delivery platform behind the inn plus the few doors and windows opening onto or over this platform. The audience was seated in the yard under an open sky, and the rain was menacing. Since then the Globe has been rebuilt. But I also remember visiting the Shakespearean theater of Ashland, Oregon, in the 1980s. This theater is built on the same pattern, the stage being the space in front of a house façade.

This video shows how flexible such a setting is, in spite of its total preset genericity. The flexibility comes from the fact that the acting space is a lot vaster and it is expanded within the Pit, those extensions being like octopus-limbs with standing audience all around, and in this production, the actors often get down into the audience or come up from the Pit. That makes the performing space more than flexible, actually volatile. Imagine then filming a play in this volatile and versatile space. The result is astounding because they moderately recreate what was common in Shakespeare's time. A play was also in a way a masque with music, dance and singing interludes regularly. That is why Shakespeare liked all kinds of situations using disguises and having characters playing what they were not, and characters being fooled out of their wits, in other words crazy. This play is using two direct episodes of this type plus one episode that is the result of the first of these two. In the first episode, the King and his courtiers disguise themselves as Russian visitors to play some seductive game with the Princess and her ladies. They disguise themselves to break their oath with the simplest pretense you can imagine: "I did not do it since it is the character carried by my disguise that did it."

The Princess and her Ladies had been warned so they disguised themselves: they exchanged the favors that had been presented to them, their capes, and they veiled their faces. The would-be Russians fell in the trap, in the four traps and declared their love to the wrong persons. When they came back as themselves, the Princess and her Ladies had switched back to their real identities and they made fun of the Russians that had tried - in vain - to entertain them and they cross-examined the men with their false declarations that were true in their own minds but false since the beneficiaries were the wrong women.

The third episode of this type is the concluding presentation of the Worthies by the third band of characters, the simple people, yet clearly characterized: One is a teacher of some kind, Holofernes, who uses Latin more than plain English. One is a preacher of some type, Nathaniel. One is a local constable. A fourth one is in fact supposed to be the entertainer of the King and his three courtiers during their three-year-long studying retreat. And a fifth one is the page, Moth, of this entertainer with even a sixth one, but female this time, Jaquenetta, some kind of milkmaid, though she will not impersonate a Worthy, since all Worthies are of course male The Worthies are supposed to be nine but only five will be presented since there are only five male plebeians: Alexander, Judas Maccabeus, Hector, Pompey the Great, Hercules as an infant. The five would-be impersonators will be laughed at, mocked, interrupted, fooled in all possible ways by the nobles, both from Navarre and from France. This production goes far beyond simple words and it ends up as a brawl more typical of a pub scene than of a court scene. Definitely, we are dealing with the inns and other shady houses of so many plays with the famous Falstaff, or some others, though we remain within a comic scene and no Mercutio will be killed by no Tybalt whom no Romeo will kill.

And yet, though this production insists and lengthens these masque scenes, there is another level of Shakespearean style at work. The architecture of the play is a perfect musical composition at all levels of the possible meaning of every single word, line, situation, and character.

For one simple instance, let us consider the end. The brawl scene I was speaking of just right now is interrupted by what would be a Deus ex Machina that propels the entertaining scene into the "abymes" that are so famous in Hollywood films. In fact, it is not a Deus ex Machina per se, though it is the King of France that is projected onto the stage, it is a Deus ex De Profundis, a Deus ex Machina that casts the death of the king of France in less than three lines on the chaotic stage.

But this kind of meaningful architectural music is everywhere, and the tempo is systematic triads of elements turned into quadriads by adding one element to the triad. Thus, we have three male courtiers, but they are four with their king. In the library scene three of them, including the King are revealed as having written sonnets or odes to three of the ladies, including, the Princess, but Berowne is revealed as having done it when Jaquenetta arrives, sent by the Princess, with Costard, to deliver Berowne's sonnet he wrote for Rosaline to the King. And then, as they say, they are "even" since they are four. I just wonder if we could not say it is the systematic square quartering of a ternary licentious circle. Only the plebeians go beyond, at times with long series of words, nouns, adjectives or verbs, though Berowne does not hesitate now and then, who is the most talkative and wordy of the males, though he remains most of the time within these three turning four and once now and then this four turning five.

This is the deepest art of Shakespeare: to systematically use a numerical formula to build all the levels of the language, the psychology of the characters and the dramatic progression of his plays. Here three is disorder, four is order, five is a promised disruption.

There could have been four marriages like in As You Like It or in A Midsummer Night's Dream, hence the triumph of Hymen, the god of matrimony, but the death of the King of France prevents it, mourning first, and Honi soit qui mal y pense. But since the four possible marriages are just postponed by 366 days, with some conditions expressed by the women, there must be some disruptive fifth element that comes into the picture, and that makes this promised quaternary ending precarious, and sure enough Don Armado arrives with Jaquenetta and they announce she is a couple-of-month pregnant and that this union will have to be sanctified straight away though it is perfectly unethical. That's the fifth union that in a way blocks the promise of four [...]

Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU