Shakespeare’s iffy early comedy ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ is a dense romp about a trio of feckless Spanish noblemen who decide it would be a wonderful idea to swear off women for three years. Naturally at this point three women turn up, prompting the lads to almost immediately renege upon their vows, albeit with a high level of accompanying shenanigans.
In his distractingly bizarre indoors take, director Nick Bagnall hurls his cast into the play with an absurdist abandon that is sometimes bracing, but frequently maddening. Bookended by gorgeous musical segments (by Laura Moody and James Fortune) that in no way reflect the weirdness within, it’s difficult to exactly pin down an overarching aesthetic. But you’re getting there if you think of a particularly unruly Saturday morning kids’ TV show, or one of those late ‘Monty Python’ series that are more weird than funny, or a gifted but irritating Oxbridge sketch troupe.
Everything is exaggerated and overamplified into a clangorous cacophony of too damn much. I absolutely do not have the time or space to list all the crazy crap that happens here, but it’s perhaps easiest to focus on a single character. Jos Vantyler plays the braggart Don Armado as a comedy Spaniard with a wobbly accent, which probably vaguely borders on the culturally insensitive... but for whatever reason the character has also been combined with that of Armado’s pageboy, Moth, whose lines Vantyler speaks in a high-pitched Yorkshire accent. Why? Presumably for no other reason than Bagnall and co found it funny. And it kind of is, but combined with many other things of the same ilk, it all becomes kind of knackering.
Look: ‘Love’s Labour’s Lost’ is not a great play. It is sort of ridiculous that more than 400 years since it was written, contemporary directors are supposed to try and do their best with it on the grounds that the author wrote ‘Hamlet’. Bagnall wrings laughs out, helped by a handful of really nice performances, notably Kneehigh regular Kirsty Woodward as the Princess of France. But where the cast of Kneehigh have the heart and brains to carry off wilful eccentricity, here the plethora of zany ideas don’t add up to any sort of meaningful take. The production’s abrupt final shift into earnestness absolutely exemplifies this – it feels preposterous that we would take any of these people seriously at this point. The let up from the wackiness only exposes the production’s essential hollowness.