The script's the thing, gifted director realizes
By Richard Ouzounian, The Toronto Star
It's ironic that Shakespeare's only comedy with an unhappy ending should provide a joyous conclusion to the main Stratford season.
Love's Labour's Lost, which opened at the Festival Theatre Wednesday night, is a diamond-bright, crystal-clear jewel of a production with only a few flaws keeping it from perfection.
Director Antoni Cimolino has done something increasingly rare at Stratford these days: He has directed the play that Shakespeare actually wrote.
Anyone looking for an outrageous reinterpretation or a superficial romp will have to go elsewhere. This is the Bard's look at young love -- with all its wit, wonderment and folly -- full and complete, right down to the achingly bittersweet finale.
The young King of Navarre and three fellow students take a vow to study, far away from the distractions of women. No sooner has the ink dried on their oath, when the fetching Princess of France and her trio of beguiling friends arrive at the court.
You can imagine the rest. This isn't Romeo And Juliet, with heaving passions and brooding tragedy. It's more of an early sketch for Much Ado About Nothing, with witty badinage conducted by an octet of bright young things.
Cimolino and his designer -- the awesomely talented Santo Loquasto -- have set the piece in 1780, and Fragonard's art provides the visual inspiration. A leafy glade, with one amusing sculpture is all we need.
Steven Hawkins bathes this setting in the mellow light of early morning or late afternoon, with ochre and olive shadows everywhere.
Loquasto's costumes are also a visual feast, and the entrance of the French Princess and her court provides eye-snapping gowns in hues of champagne and burgundy that dazzle us.
In such a perfect frame, all the actors have to do is shine and most of them clearly do.
Cimolino has cast the King and Princess against type with delightful results. Sean Carty's monarch offers us Jean-Jacques Rousseau meets Phillip Seymour Hoffman -- a bizarre but appealing combination, while Dana Green's heir to the French throne is the most knowing of the lot: a shining sophisticate, rather than the vain young girl we're often given.
Another key to the director's concept is to provide increasing importance to Costard, the earthy young man who spends his time pouncing on the willing Jaquenetta. Instead of a tedious rustic, in this version, he becomes a refreshing symbol of the natural order, a man who shows his emotions without hiding behind a shield of words.
In this role, Jonathan Goad is nothing short of delicious. His comic timing is impeccable, his physical dexterity a joy, and the twinkle in his eye lights the whole performance up with a life-affirming sense of good will.
A sharp contrast is the moody and fantastical Spaniard, Don Adriano de Armado, played by Brian Bedford with his customary excellence.
After so many years, it's thrilling to see Bedford display something he never has before. His desiccated Hispanic grandee has more than the requisite whiff of Don Quixote about him, but Bedford also imbues him with a sweet melancholy that still allows for amazing amounts of humour to creep through.
In the two leading roles, Graham Abbey (as Berowne) and Michelle Giroux (as Rosaline) both have much to recommend them.
Giroux has never looked lovelier than she does here, and her cool, still elegance is perfect for the role. She snaps out insults like Christmas crackers, then follows them with a smile -- hurting and healing simultaneously.
Abbey gives his richest Stratford performance to date as Berowne. He seems to have dug deep within and connected with the swaggering young man who finally finds someone he can love more than himself. And no one can radiate an air of boyish camaraderie as well as Abbey. He's every guy's best friend, and rightly so.
Both leading actors, however, do suffer from issues with their diction: In moments of passion, Abbey grows muddy and Giroux gets clipped. The rest of their work is so good, you wish they could eliminate those flaws.
There are a few other problems with the show. The comic characters of Nathaniel, Holofernes and Dull have not been properly conceived by the director, designer or actors (Barry MacGregor, Brian Tree and Tim MacDonald) and their few scenes land with a thud. The costumes are bland, the invention lacking, the performances all too familiar.
And Don Armado's young sidekick, Moth, is inappropriately played by Jacob James with the hyper musical comedy air of someone auditioning to replace Matthew Broderick in The Producers.
There is also something unpleasantly music theatre-ish about the score of Craig Bohmler, which falls on the ears with an obviousness quite at odds with the rest of the piece.
But these flaws ultimately do not distract from its major achievement: the fact that director Cimolino has proved you can stage a Shakespeare play at Stratford and still have the author be the star.
The opening night audience laughed long and loud, but not at comic props or mugging actors. The merriment flowed naturally from the lines in the script, and that is a wonderful thing.
Coming at the end of season that often seemed mired in shallowness and vulgarity, this production provides something that Stratford has been in desperate need of: a touch of class.