Love’s Labour’s Lost 
5/5 

Love’s Labour’s Won 
5/5 

Royal Shakespeare Theatre

Stratford-Upon-Avon

VERY seldom does a reviewer find productions of Shakespeare that make criticism almost irrelevant. 

Yet Christopher Luscombe’s ingenious coupling of Love’s Labour’s Lost, an early apprentice comedy with Much Ado About Nothing — also known as Love’s Labour’s Won — are consummate theatre works which meld comic action, visual splendour, music and superb acting. 

The Edwardian setting either side of the first world war is meticulously recreated in designer Simon Higlett’s library of a Tudor mansion which is modelled on Stratford-upon-Avon’s neighbouring Charlecote Park, itself not a million miles away from Downton Abbey. 

Here we find the King of Navarre and his three upper-class mates — in a later and less civilised age no doubt applicants for the Bullingdon Club, but here concerned with idealistic self-improvement schemes rather than hostelry trashing. 

Their vow to spend a monastic three years in study free from the “temptations” of the world — women — is immediately challenged by the arrival of the French princess and her entourage of three available ladies. The comedy ensues as each of the trio struggle to hide their vow-breaking frustrations from the ladies. 

The main contest is between Edward Bennett’s cavalier Berowne and Michelle Terry’s sparky Rosaline. At its conclusion, the gay young things separate to face the gathering clouds of war. 

Much Ado opens with the library transformed into a hospital for returning wounded officers. Here the battle of wits between Bennett’s recognisable Benedick and Terry’s Beatrice are resumed but the gaiety has taken on a more recriminatory edge which is informed, it seems, by tragic experience. 

There are hilarious set pieces, as when in Love’s Labour’s Lost the four would-be aesthetes each in turn overhear their friends reading sad attempts at sonnets to their chosen girls and there’s a marvellous silent-film court scene, reminiscent of the cabin crush in the Marx Brothers’ A Night at the Opera.

These are painfully funny yet they are powerfully counterbalanced in the central church confrontation in the later play, during which Beatrice demands that Benedick should kill his friend Claudio who has humiliatingly rejected her cousin at the altar. 

The supporting cast is universally splendid but Nick Haverson really does catch the eye as the earthy gardener Costard and later the manic mismanager of words Dogberry. 

Love’s Labour’s Won is a production which marries Shakespeare to a recognisably modern world where the comedy of life is always coloured by its tragedies. It will surely result in the hugely appreciative youngsters in the galleries attending the performances I saw getting hooked on Shakespeare, and perhaps theatre, for life. 

Runs until March 14, box office: rsc.org.uk