Love's Labor's Lost

June 18 play#5 Love's Labor's Lost- Stratford Shakespeare Festival

I just don't like it. I just don't like Love's Labor's Lost. There are whole chunks of it that elude me. This production was well-meaning. It was produced in the Stratford Festival's smaller theater the Tom Patterson Theater and the cast was made up mostly of younger actors- the folks who played some of the smaller roles in Romeo and Juliet. The performances were good enough. The actors had a lot of energy, which was appreciated. They had a ten year old playing Moth which was a terrific idea and added a lot.

I just didn't care. They set it, when? Probably right after the restoration of Charles II. That's as close as I could place it. There were a couple of very funny performances and the director was a "blocking machine"- I admired that aspect of the director's work as only one who loves blocking could. But the whole thing was...dead. I didn't care. I didn't want to be there. I was mad because there wasn't any wine sold during intermission. I was happy because there was no one sitting next to me and I had an aisle seat - so I had plenty of elbow room. I really liked that feature- so I evaluated my experience comparable to a flight on a commercial airliner. How I wished they had served peanuts!

I am a true skeptic when it comes to Shakespeare's lesser known plays. I have never seen a production of one of his lesser-knowns that has moved me. The best I can come up with sometimes is "there were some interesting things there." Smart people tell me that I'm wrong, so I must be, but I just don't get it.

Now don;t get me wrong, there were performances worth admiration- Brian Tree was terrific as Costard and long-time Stratford Festival actor Peter Donaldson gave me the biggest single laugh I had for the whole festival as Don Armado- but the pair of quartets were lacking in my mind. They were all very attractive and had lots of energy- they were just so... stagey. yeah, that's it. They acted in a manner that humans only act when, well, they're in a play.

I think sometimes about the notion that Elizabethan actors were in a unique place in their society- that dress was a distinct way of defining class- poor people wore crappy clothes and rich people wore nice clothes. Poor people didn't play dress up- there was no imitation wool or lace. Everyone knew your status in society by what you wore. Actors were the only exception to that. They were the only poor people who wore nice clothing. So, how did that make them move in their costumes? Did they know how to or were they just giving a ridiculous imitation of how they thought the upper classes moved?

Were they better at it then?