[FairfieldLife] 'D.C. Theater Production Merges Shakespeare, Maharishi & The Beatles'

Sat, 19 Aug 2006 03:35:32 -0700

Theatre
Love's Labours Lost

*** The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon

Michael Billington
Saturday August 19, 2006
The Guardian

Stratford's Complete Works season continues to throw up surprises. Washington DC's Shakespeare Theatre Company bring us a Love's Labours Lost that, although full of sprightly invention, is based on an entirely spurious premise: that there is a parallel between Shakespeare's world-fleeing lovers and the pop groups, headed by the Beatles, who flocked to the Maharishi's Ganges ashram in the late 1960s.
Michael Kahn's concept doesn't hold water for two minutes. The King of Navarre, Berowne and the rest, by their three-year period of academic seclusion, are consciously seeking fame: the fugitive pop groups who went east were, if anything, escaping its consequences. Shakespeare's play satirises and exploits high-flying conceits and affected verbal pedantry: hardly qualities for which the leading entertainers of the 1960s were renowned. And, although Kahn translates the Princess and her followers into chic tourists and Costard into a hairy hippie, the strain eventually tells.
One particular scene exposes the flaw in Kahn's idea: the famous one in which Berowne eavesdrops on the lovers' successive abandonment of their vows. The separateness of the lovers hiding in different trees, on which the joke depends, is here ruined by the fact that they start to chummily harmonise together on drums and guitar.
Yet, for all its silliness, I couldn't dislike Kahn's production, largely because it is so energetic. Heavens knows what a schoolmaster is doing in the middle of an ashram, but Ted van Griethuysen, in the performance of the evening, turns the pedagogic Holofernes into a wonderfully overweening mix of WC Fields and American academic Harold Bloom. He even enters, at one point, bearing a placard describing himself as the author of Shakespeare and Me.
The Princess and her train - who arrive on Vespas, go hunting in pith helmets and shorts, and later sport 1960s micro-skirts - are a fetching bunch, brightly led by Claire Lautier, with Angela Pierce as her bosom pal. Amir Arison's guru-like King, Hank Stratton's buoyant Berowne (oddly pronounced "Beroon") and Michael Milligan's joint-rolling Costard (chanting "We gotta fights the fascists, man") display abundant energy.
As a reinvention of a Shakespeare comedy, it doesn't begin to compare with the Indian Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this year. But, even if its changes are largely cosmetic, they are at least applied with spirit.
· Until August 26. Box office: 0870 609 1110.



Talk is cheap. Use Yahoo! Messenger to make PC-to-Phone calls. Great rates starting at 1¢/min. __._,_.___

To subscribe, send a message to:
[EMAIL PROTECTED]

Or go to:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/FairfieldLife/
and click 'Join This Group!'



YAHOO! GROUPS LINKS



__,_._,___

Reply via email to