The Theater: All in Aught

LOVE’S LABOR’S LOST by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

The Royal Shakespeare Company is one of the glories of the English-speaking stage. It is a touchstone troupe whose productions linger in the mind as definitive. In its brief two-month stay at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the R.S.C. is presenting three works, a little-known Maxim Gorky play called Summerfolk, a shortened version of King Lear, and an infrequently performed Shakespeare play, Love’s Labor’s Lost. Here is proof, once again, of the company’s complete artistic mastery.

Love’s Labor’s Lost is an early comedy in which Shakespeare frolics with words. Sometimes they seem deliberately designed to be mockingly pedantic, zestful in excess. Then suddenly the master of language will yoke his dramatic poetry like a chariot to the sun.

Sylvan Scene. The plot is wafer-thin. It centers on the idea (a recurring one in Shakespeare) of nobles renouncing the splendor, gaiety and fleshly corruption of the court for a quasi-religious retreat amid the guileless innocence of the countryside. The King of Navarre (David Suchet) proposes to his three attendant lords, Longaville (Robert Ashby), Dumaine (Michael Ensign) and Berowne (Ian Richardson), that they form “a little academe.” They pledge to meditate, study, fast, and forswear women. This pledge is scarcely uttered when four devilishly distracting ladies appear on the sylvan scene.

They are the Princess of France (Susan Fleetwood) and her ladies-in-waiting, Maria (Lynette Davies), Katherine (Janet Chappell) and Rosaline (Estelle Kohler). In no time the lordly abstainers are meditating only on their ladies’ beauty and studying how to sneak love letters to them. Irony outraces irony, and the jollity is compounded by a covey of curates, schoolmasters and clowns. The R.S.C. invests the evening with lyricism, ardor and joy. In a superbly articulated performance (no surprise from one of the finest actors alive), Ian Richardson as Berowne sums up Shakespeare’s conviction that all Utopian dreams run afoul of human needs, desires and nature, and that life is the tutor of words, not words the master of life:

From women ‘s eyes this doctrine I derive:

They sparkle still the right Promethean fire; They are the books, the arts, the academes,

That show, contain and nourish all the world,

Else none at all in aught proves excellent.

T.E. Kelem