Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane
Stephen Joseph Theatre and Shakespeare North Playhouse production
Stephen Joseph Theatre
March 27-April 19, 2025; 2hrs 45mins
Shakespeare: love him or hate him, you can’t avoid him. Well, unless you visit the Stephen Joseph Theatre in Scarborough at the moment, where one of the playwright's early comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost, has been given a good going-over by writers Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane.
They pair did a similar rewrite job on The Comedy of Errors a few years ago - adding the "more or less" suffix to the title to make it clear the Bard had unsolicited assistance. They add the bracketed trio of words to the title here once again, to return to the scene of what purists might consider the crime, with co-conspirator director Paul Robinson.
Love’s Labour’s Lost (More or Less) is one of those plays whose title you might recognise without knowing the plot. All I recalled was that it was about four privileged blokes, including a royal, who give up women in favour of study and healthy living.
The Godber/Lane version updates the action to the 1990s, and the setting to party-time Ibiza, where a bride and bridegroom’s stag and hen parties end up staying in the same hotel. The treatment adds a catalogue of 1990s pop songs for excitement and good measure, and that’s what I call a Shakespearian jukebox musical.
Does any of this mucking about with the original really matter? Perhaps to scholars and those who yearn pure, unadulterated Shakespeare. But he wasn’t exactly beyond borrowing stories from other sources and putting his own spin on them. And why moan about it, when the result is as much fun as this show proves to be? After nearly three hours, at which point the audience is clapping, swaying and joining in the final medley, Light My Fire, I’m Too Sexy and the Macarena to name but three, all thoughts of Shakespeare have dissolved. I lost the plot, so to speak, quite early in the proceedings, what with all the secret letters, sexual shenanigans and general argy-bargy as the stags try to honour the agreement with the bride’s father not to go near a woman for three days. And it hardly matters that I did.
This is a youthful cast, whose members mostly double-up on roles and whose sense of enjoyment in what they’re doing comes across to the audience. When else in a Shakespeare play will they get the chance to be Cher impersonators, dressing up to sing The Shoop Shoop Song?
For the record they are Timothy Adam Lucas, Annie Kirkman, Thomas Cotran, Jo Patmore, Alyce Liburd, Linford Johnson, Alice Imelda and David Kirkbride and I, for one, can’t wait for the next Godber/Lane Shakespearian mash-up. It's a safe bet there will be one...
More info and tickets here
