Love's Labour's Lost

This is a play as much about language, and its failings, as it is about love and its failings – and I have rarely seen the arguments delivered more persuasively and with such clarity.

As chief wit at the court of Navarre, Berowne (David Tennant) is the last in a group of aristocratic friends to sign up to an oath of abstinence from worldly pleasures in their pursuit of intellectual excellence. It only takes the arrival of the Princess of France (Mariah Gale) and her three friends to encourage the boys to discard their vows and go a’wooing.

Within the play are seeds and characters that appear in many other of Shakespeare’s comedies – the vain braggart Don Adriano de Armado (Joe Dixon) is Malvolio with a Spanish twist.

The entertainment devised by Holofernes for the court recalls the Rude Mechanicals’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Berowne and Rosaline are, in effect, Benedick and Beatrice in their youth.

Leading, but by no means dominating, a terrific cast, Tennant is a selfless Berowne, light and witty and cool. He is a genuine Shakespearean, able to toy with the audience without crossing over into vanity stand-up.

Whatever doubts that may have hovered around his Hamlet must surely be dispelled. He is at home on the stage in a great RSC company as he is as the Time Lord in the Tardis.

Of the many felicitous things on show here, I enjoyed Riann Steele as Jaquenetta with her butter-churning antics, like a 16th-century pole dance; the appearance of Don Armado and his identically dressed page Moth (Zoe Thorne), who resembles Mini-Me, and Dumaine’s (Sam Alexander) touching love poem, accompanying himself on a lute, which got him a well-deserved burst of applause.

Although it has been seeded earlier, the sudden shift of mood at the end of the play, when death enters to wreck the party, is well handled; coming immediately after the callous humiliation of the pompous but inoffensive Don Armado, there is a sense that these over-privileged, over-educated youths have got their just deserts.

Berowne’s cry at the injustice of an unhappy ending, “Jack hath not Jill!”, is delivered with just the right amount of adolescent petulance.

The effervescent country dance and the well-placed music are bonuses; the arrival of a bear with the lads disguised as Russians is falling-over funny.

While it may have a tearful, ambiguous and far from conclusive ending, this is a joyous, exhilarating, big-hearted production. I absolutely loved it.

OUR VERDICT: 5/5

Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-Upon-Avon, 0844 800 1110, in rep until November 15