1985 BBC Production

Directed by Elijah Moshinsky, this production starred Jonathan Kent as The King of Navarre; Christopher Blake as Longaville; Geoffrey Burridge as Dumaine; Mike Gwilym as Berowne; David Warner as Don Armado; John Kane as Moth; Paul Jesson as Costard; Clifford Rose as Boyet; Maureen Lipman as the Princess of France; Katy Behean as Maria; Petra Markham as Katharine; and Jenny Agutter as Rosaline.

Commenting on this production in the 1985 booklet the BBC issued to accompany the first broadcast of this version (17–25), Henry Fenwick compared the play’s structure to that of a dance, calling it “precise, witty, ordered” (12). He noted that producer Shaun Sutton had hoped that director Elijah Moshinsky would agree to direct the production because of Moshinsky’s strong visual sense and interest in elegant polish. Unusually for a play in the series, Fenwick reported, this one is set in a later era than Shakespeare’s, as if it were an opera by Mozart with a strong Commedia dell’arte influence. It blends formality and fantasy, with a setting suggesting a decayed classical culture (17). Moshinsky said he was influenced by the painter Antoine Watteau, with emphasis on a park that is not a literal park. He wanted to emphasize contrasts between different attitudes towards love—some romantic, some more serious (18). Barbara Gosnold, the set designer, drew on such influences as Watteau, medieval Books of Hours, and Mozart operas, with the set also constructed to fit the actor (David Warner) who plays Don Armado, a character resembling not only Malvolio (in Twelfth Night) but also Don Quixote and Sancho Panza (19). Colin Lavers, the costume designer, also mentioned the influence of Watteau and an emphasis on wigs rather than hats (20). Meanwhile, producer Sutton defended the play; stressed the need for a fast pace; added two additional scenes consisting of lines borrowed from elsewhere in the work; and stressed the play’s own interest in the themes of comedy and wit (21). Mike Gwilym, playing Berowne, found this character somewhat static, uninterested in telling the truth, and mainly interested in playing games (22). Gwilym agreed with Moshinsky that the play needs to be kept from falling flat; he used his sense of mocking humor to help prevent that from happening. He saw the ending as not producing genuine love relationships (since the characters barely know one another) and also saw greater wisdom in the women than in the men. Moshinsky agreed that the couples are not especially made for each other (in fact, he tried to imply this by giving Rosaline and Berowne contrasting colors of hair) and considered the same thing true of the King and Princess. Suggesting that the Princess never really falls in love with the King (24), Moshinsky said he saw the whole play as an exploration of comedy and its relationship to reality. He argued that the final play-within-the-play is an artificial bit of business continually interrupted by reality. He considered the final song an ironic example of corrosive realism (25).

In their pioneering 1988 critical anthology Shakespeare on Television, J. C. Bulman and H. R. Coursen surveyed and reprinted many early reactions to this production. Thus, a critic for The Washington Post disliked this broadcast’s deemphasis on “irony” and “poignance” and its smug, condescending characters but did praise some acting in the “smaller parts,” especially by David Warner and John Wells. A writer for the Los Angeles Times did not find the production “particularly entertaining,” nor did a commentator for the Times Literary Supplement, although he mostly blamed the play’s own archaic, arcane jokes but also disliked the BBC’s updated, often irrelevant setting while nonetheless crediting Maureen Lipman for this version’s “one notable performance” (312).

Frances Teague, reviewing the production for the Shakespeare on Film Newsletter when it first appeared, called it “handsome,” said it “pleased both eye and ear,” but found it sadly “dull.” She regretted its deemphasis on “physical comedy” (1); thought many of the performances “seemed heavy and drained of energy”; disliked the overly rapid pace, the “heavy cuts and rearrangements”; and suggested that many alterations implied the director’s distrust of Shakespeare’s writing and the audience’s intelligence. According to Teague, “Visually and aurally the production was so serene and careful that one lost sight of Shakespeare’s quicksilver comedy. An air of melancholy, with an occasional flash of mean-spiritedness, obscured the play’s charming, farcical wit” (2).

Miriam Gilbert, in her 1993 book on the play (56–76), described the background to the use of particular painters and paintings as inspirations for the BBC productions in general (56–58) but also commented particularly on the loss, in this production, of many of the play’s distinctive accents and idioms (60). She discussed the formal setting and costumes (60–61); said that any changes to such formality are instantly noticed (61–62); and observed that the main settings are a library, a park, and Armado’s room, which are where all the characters are subtly transformed (62). Mentioning the meaning of changes in hairstyles and wigs to suggest changes in character, especially among women (62–64), she also noted how the emphasis on wit combats is occasionally supplemented by “physical action” and explained how some of the action was filmed (64-65). Commenting on some specifics of casting and performances, especially of Berowne and the Princess of France (65–67), Gilbert also suggested that the director uses an “anti-romantic approach” to some of the major characters (68–69). She explored Moshinsky’s interest in “meta-theatricality” (69–0) and in “issues of artifice and reality” (70–71) and noted a deemphasis here on “elaborate physical comedy” (71–72). She suggested that ultimately the production can be variously interpreted (72–74); thought the young men are always viewed ironically here; and saw a general emphasis on detachment rather than genuine romantic feeling. Asserting that “Moshinsky aims, I think, at giving us the play as satire, but also protects himself by making the [play’s] world pretty and elegant” (74), she concluded that “this production seems to exploit the ‘coolness’ [of television], but not its potential for emotional depth” (76).

Peter Cochran, in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare, found the voices in this production monotonous; considered the design attractive but tedious; thought the characters are uninteresting; said Berowne is well played; asserted that the play itself is flat; but called the entrance of Mercado well done (84).

2000 Kenneth Branagh Production

Directed by Kenneth Branagh, this version starred Alessandro Nivola as King Ferdinand of Navarre; Alicia Silverstone as the Princess of France; Natascha McElhone as Rosaline; Kenneth Branagh as Berowne; Carmen Ejogo as Maria; Matthew Lillard as Longaville; Adrian Lester as Dumaine; Emily Mortimer as Katherine; and Richard Briers as Nathaniel.

Daniel Rosenthal, in his book from 2000 titled Shakespeare on Screen (160–61), called this production “a delight” and cited critical praise. He noted that it “cuts almost 75 per cent of an exceptionally wordy text and transforms a rarely staged play … into an old-fashioned musical,” saying that it “leaves you humming its tunes, or replaying the dance routines.” According to Rosenthal, “The problem with Love’s Labour’s Lost as Shakespeare is that it is difficult to recall any scenes as written by the Bard.” Praising the “superb” Oxbridge settings of the present production, he wrote that Branagh “goes all out for romance”; called all of it “captivating, despite some slightly amateurish—and oddly endearing—edges to the singing and dancing” (except from Lester and Lane); but suggested that a “greater problem arises from the shifts out of simple lyrics or newsreel commentary back into lofty Shakespearean metaphor. By the time you’ve readjusted,” Rosenthal thought, “the next song may be seconds away,” so that “Shakespeare is reduced to filler material.” He thought that “everyone but Silverstone handles the verse well” and concluded that at the end of the film the “couples drive off for a bittersweet airfield farewell that pays tribute to Casablanca. It’s a perfect finale,” but one “spoiled by Branagh’s sentimental epilogue,” which “end[s] with a joyful … reunion” (160).

In his 2002 book Shakespeare in Space, Herbert R. Coursen found appropriate allusions in this film both to Casablanca (at the end) and to The Wizard of Oz (in the shift from black and white to color [161]) and wrote that the “music that Branagh imports into the film is cued—as in 1930s musicals—by the merest hint” (163). He thought “the film ‘superbly’ dramatizes the theme of ‘organized disagreement’” (164) and said that “[t]he film nestles gently into its chosen moment—a moment outside of history—as neatly as an engagement diamond given in 1939 snugged into its Tiffany setting,” noting that despite his own anticipation of a different conclusion, “the film earns its happy ending” (166).

Gayle Holste, in an essay from 2002 titled “Branagh’s Labour’s Lost: Too Much, Too Little, Too Late,” asserted that Branagh’s “failed experiment makes it all too obvious that there are good reasons for the lack of movie musicals in recent years. Audiences of the thirties and forties, in their eagerness to escape the grim realities of the Great Depression and the war, were more inclined to make the mental adjustment necessary to allow for the characters’ bursting into song (accompanied by a full, yet often invisible, orchestra).” She thought that “today’s audiences, accustomed to films which strive for ever-greater realism, find it too jarring to make the necessary suspension of disbelief required to accept such artificial conventions. Added to this problem is the further mental adjustment needed to shift between the Elizabethan English of the text and the modern English of the songs” (230).

In the Romana Wray article, also published in 2002 (“Nostalgia for Navarre: The Melancholic Metacinema of Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost”), she suggested that by “[c]onstructing the musical as a distractive indulgence,” the film’s “generic discontinuity suggests an oppositional analysis of the 1930s in terms of a self-serving political myopia and a policy of appeasement. Certainly,” Wray continued, “the fact that the immersion in music has a costly consequence is made clear in the newsreel’s closing montage, which includes glimpses of fascist regalia. Here, more than at any other point, are stressed not only the human ramifications of a politics of distraction, but also the concomitant competition between British and American styles of self-representation” (174).

Discussing this version in his 2003 book Shakespeare at the Cineplex, Samuel Crowl praised Branagh’s “wit and invention”; commended his realization that Shakespeare’s play resembles Hollywood musicals (39); and suggested that by “beginning his film on September 1, 1939, as Hitler was rolling into Poland, Branagh provides both a motivation for and critique of the King of Navarre’s decision to retreat into his academy.” According to Crowl, “by adding war to woman as part of the world’s call,” Branagh “deepens the impact of Shakespeare’s refusal to allow his play to end with the conventional happy ending.” But Crowl also, like other critics, noted that “the film does achieve a happy ending of a different sort as some (but not all) of the men are reunited with the women as an orchestral reprise of ‘They Can’t Take That Away from Me’ swells on the sound track” (43).

In a 2003 essay titled “Sure Can Sing and Dance: Minstrelsy, the Star System, and the Post- Postcoloniality of Love’s Labour’s Lost and Twelfth Night,” Katherine Eggert argued that “America, initially the subaltern obliged by its inferior cultural status to attend to a Shakespearean language it does not understand, ultimately revises high culture by translating Shakespeare either into a nonlinguistic spectacle, or into a racialized, colonial, and distinctly non-British language, or into some combination of both.” She added that “whether they applaud or decry the democratization of Shakespeare in contemporary popular culture, critics generally agree that Shakespeare without Shakespeare, stripped as much as possible of Shakespearean language and translated into American popular idiom, has triumphed” (74) and saw Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost as an example of this historical devolution.

W. B. Worthen, in his 2003 book titled Shakespeare and the Force of Modern Performance (69–72), commented on Branagh’s attempt to link Shakespeare’s play to Hollywood musicals (69); suggested the “mixed results” of this attempt, especially in the singing and dancing (except for Nathan Lane, a talented Broadway performer, although Worthen found his constant horn-tooting annoying); and praised Lane’s performance of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” as “one of the few moments” in the film in which “the performance actually delivers the work of musical comedy: that blend of apparent nonchalance and evident technical mastery of voice and movement.” But Worthen faulted not the actors for the film’s weaknesses but rather the direction, writing that the “production seems hemmed in by a desire to make singing and dancing somehow plausible, low-key, realistic, a failure of nerve that violates the gestalt of musical-comedy performativity” (71). He concluded that the “film’s elegant designs, to say nothing of the music of Cole Porter and many others, work to summon the play’s sublime artificiality” but added that the film “shies away from” its true potential (72).

In an essay from 2003 titled “The Singing Shakespearean: Kenneth Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Politics of Genre,” Ramona Wray concluded that “Branagh’s failed attempt to rework Shakespeare for a fin-de-siecle sensibility leaves his spectators in a cultural nowhere, adrift in a flood of discrete and disassociated generic frameworks. His filmic experiment,” she asserted, “emerges as a confused amalgam, a screen product hesitating between modes of intertextual communication, layerings of nostalgic construction, and collisions of generic and national identification” (167).

Writing about the Branagh Love’s Labour’s Lost in his 2004 book Cinematic Shakespeare 126–27), Michael Anderegg asserted that, “Unlike Much Ado, Love’s Labour’s Lost lacks a tightly interlocked ‘comic’ and ‘serious’ narrative line. The various sets of characters are related to each other very loosely, and almost everything of interest in the play stems from Shakespeare’s overflowing pleasure in his own linguistic facility.” He thought that Branagh’s decision to cast the film as a musical only increased its “artificiality,” so that “the characters are imprecisely located, neither inhabiting a recognisable world nor fitting into a consistently stylized universe” and the “‘prescripted’ songs add to the disconcerting sense that we are nowhere in particular,” a sense enhanced by the ill-fitting “newsreel clips” (126). Anderegg also thought that the “camera setups appear more as necessities than choices: the feeling is one of severe economic constraints that have not been imaginatively engaged” (126–27) and that the singing and dancing (except for Adrian Lester and Nathan Lane) “seldom rise to a level above the amateurish” (127).

Michael D. Friedman, in an essay from 2004 titled “‘I Won’t Dance, Don’t Ask Me’: Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the American Film Musical,” asserted that “[m]any of the aspects of the American film musical imported by Branagh into Love’s Labour’s Lost clash with basic elements of the play’s construction, rendering the final product an artistically flawed piece of cinema. Specifically, Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play about women who decline to dance with men—both literally, during the Masque of the Muscovites, and metaphorically at the end of the play, when the women refuse (for the time being) to enter the state of matrimony symbolized by the dance.” According to Friedman, “The genre of the American film musical, however, depends upon the literal and metaphorical willingness of women to dance. As a result, Branagh cuts the Masque of the Muscovites and adds an entirely new ending in which the men serve out their penances and reunite with the women, presumably in marriage. Moreover,” he continued, “the American film musical also relies for much of its appeal upon the dancing talents of its performers, yet Branagh, by casting actors rather than dancers, fails to deliver the virtuoso performances that the genre demands. Therefore, the movie tends to satisfy neither those viewers expecting a recognizable version of Shakespeare’s play nor those prepared to judge Love’s Labour’s Lost by the conventions of the American film musical” (134).

In an essay from 2005 titled “‘It Doth Forget to Do the Thing It Should’: Kenneth Branagh, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and (Mis)Interpreting the Musical Genre,” Kelli Marshall examined Branagh’s movie “alongside other classical Hollywood films like Flying Down to Rio (Thornton Freeland, 1933) and Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935), and maintain[ed] that while there are surface similarities in the films’ props (cocktails, suitcases, cigarettes); costumes (ties, top hats, tails); Berlin and Gershwin songs; soundstage settings; and (altered) happy endings, there are actually few structural or historical likenesses.” According to Marshall, “Not only does Branagh omit three of the most important conventions of 1930’s musical comedies—for example, constructing the screen personas of the lead stars, integrating the musical numbers into the narrative, and casting people who cannot sing and/or dance—the director also presumably fails to consider the temporal dimensions of these films and the strict censorship that regulated their sexual content” (84).

In his comprehensive 2006 book on The Films of Kenneth Branagh (149–65), Samuel Crowl described the film’s genesis (149–50), its casting, the cast’s training in song and dance (150), and Branagh’s personal history with the play (150–51). He called the play itself “highly patterned” and witty (151) and then commented on the film’s cast and their professional experiences (152). Noting that Branagh includes about a quarter of the play’s text (153) and includes many well-known songs from the 1930s (153–54), Crowl discussed how the songs are used, the cast’s costumes, and the ways the film is structured (155–56). He called “Cheek to Cheek” the best of the film’s dance numbers but also admired “They Can’t Take That Away from Me” (156–57). Noting how this film’s ending alludes to the ending of Casablanca and the way the ending here is orchestrated musically (157), he reported that because the film’s first test screening failed, Branagh added “news” segments to aid narrative flow and enhance unity. These segments added an emphasis on World War II, risking adding (in Crowl’s view) a touch of sentimentality to Shakespeare’s play (159). Crowl was disappointed by the “slapstick” of the Don Armado subplot (160), saying that Nathan Lane on his own is much funnier (161). He praised the “high spirits” of the cast (161–62); noted that the song and dances weren’t likely to appeal to a target audience of teenagers when the film was released (162); and cited criticism of Branagh for allegedly treating the musical material ironically (162–63). In defense, Crowl argued that in fact Branagh seems to adore this material (163). He cited critics who faulted the film, especially for its allegedly unsuccessful singing and dancing (163) and concluded by suggesting that perhaps the problem was that the songs were too American and thus were inappropriate to the play (164).

Emma French, in her 2006 book Selling Shakespeare to Hollywood (90–95), mainly discussed efforts to market the film, partly by emphasizing eroticism, and partly by promoting it as a Shakespeare play, a Branagh film, and a reworking of early Hollywood song-and-dance movies. She noted that the film was not commercially successful (90–95).

Commenting on this work in his 2007 book Studying Shakespeare on Film, Maurice Hindle wrote that while “[c]onveying a plot even slighter than Much Ado, the enthusiastic cast of Love’s Labour’s Lost sing and dance themselves out on a small number of studio sets … offering the kinds of ‘stage frame’ indispensable for the effective performance of comedies and musicals.” He thought that “Branagh certainly captures the luminous look of the classic Technicolor film musical” but wished that its amateurism were less amateurish and that it alluded to fewer other genres than it does, especially in its unfortunate use of supposed newsreel footage. Hindle ultimately concluded that “the World War II perspective … evoking a nostalgically British tone of togetherness in adversity is at complete variance with the all-American tone of the Hollywood film musical” (61).

In his 2008 handbook Shakespeare and Film: A Norton Guide, Samuel Crowl (118–19, 155–56) not only briefly noted that this production emphasizes musical comedy and cuts three-quarters of Shakespeare’s text but also discussed the dancing (118–19) and found the stress on 1930s musical comedy appropriate to a pre– World War II timeframe and setting (156).

Douglas E. Green, in an essay from 2008 titled “Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost and the Return of the Hollywood Musical: Song of the Living Dead,” wrote that this play “may have seemed the perfect text for adaptation by someone who needs Shakespeare to raise money but wants paradoxically to dispense with Shakespeare on screen. Though ultimately the moribund Hollywood musical affords Branagh no escape, his synthesis of the film musical’s conventions and one of Shakespeare’s oddest texts may explain why, despite the amateurishness of the song-and-dance numbers, odd ball Shakespeareans and movie-musical cultists may feel a certain camp affection … for Branagh’s genre-bending film adaptation” (81).

In another article from 2008 (“Playing with Shakespeare’s Play: Branagh’s Love’s Labour’s Lost”), Anna K. Nardo not only suggested that Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost emphasizes both the joys and the dangers of imprecise language (14) but also contended that Branagh’s film “plays with the musical comedy’s leaps to another level of reality” (15). Defending the film, she concluded that “the interplay between Shakespeare, part of our distant past, playing with the cultural conventions of his own (to us, even more distant) past, and Branagh playing with the cultural conventions of our more recent past (the pre-Second World War film era) creates the kind of ‘plural present’ that, according to Ihab Hassan, is one characteristic of the postmodern sensibility.” She argued that “[s]uch hybridization produces ‘a different concept of tradition, one in which continuity and discontinuity, high and low culture, mingle not to imitate but to expand the past in the present,’” According to Nardo, “Hassan’s description matches both Shakespeare himself and Branagh who, in imitation of his predecessor, joyously cannibalizes past styles and genres at will” (22).

Peter Cochran, writing in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (50–51), criticized the 1930s setting, the unoriginal music, the news reports, and the performances of Silverstone and Lane (50–51), adding that “never have so many talented actors been made to look so stupid. … only Adrian Lester (whose dancing is immaculate) survives with dignity intact.” He speculated that no one would want to rewatch this film (51).

Assessing the movie in her 2017 book titled Devouring Time (320–27), Philippa Sheppard called this adaptation “dewey with nostalgia,” “fantasies of home” (320), “elegiac in tone” (323), and “yearning … for a lifestyle that has passed forever” (325). She thought that the songs emphasize the interests of “the leisure class” (326); noted the production’s “visual allusions to old films” (327); and discussed its use of the “melancholy image of the lone person sweeping the stage” (328). She commented on its depiction of an “artificially oversized moon” (329); said its nostalgia “inspires us to question our collective memories” (331); and asserted that Shakespeare’s language does not seem out of place in the era in which the film is set (331). Suggesting that the film conveys nostalgia for an era when Britain was culturally preeminent, she suggested that it honors “British antecedents to the musical and jazz” (336). Sheppard pointed to indications that Branagh was “suffering from the fin de siècle malaise of nostalgia”: (1) his very decision to adapt Shakespeare; (2) his decision to set the film in an earlier era; (3) his decision to use music from that earlier era instead of “commissioning original music”; and (4) his decision to allude to earlier films. Finding this adaptation perfectly typical of postmodernism, Sheppard wrote that very little in it is “fresh or new.” She suggested not only that this “nostalgia for the art of the past reveals a deep insecurity about the present and the future” but also that “any homage often is most effective at reminding the viewer how much better the original was than the copy.” Thus, “the jazz songs that Branagh uses to replace Shakespeare’s poetry, charming though they are, seem slight in comparison. His new versions of the songs and dances similarly pale compared to Astaire and Ginger’s initial performance of them.” For Sheppard, a film like this version of Love’s Labour’s Lost can therefore “seem like a wild grasping after creativity instead of [achieving] the genuine article” (337).

2010 Shakespeare’s Globe Production

This version, a film of a staged production at London’s Shakespeare’s Globe theater, was directed by Dominic Dromgoole and starred Philip Cumbus as Ferdinand; Trystan Gravelle as Berowne; Michelle Terry as the Princess of France; and Thomasin Rand as Rosaline.

Peter Cochran, discussing this production in his 2013 book Small-Screen Shakespeare (85–86), thought the physical comedy was often overdone; considered the actors’ speaking styles lucid and thoughtful; noted the variety of accents used (85); and, admiring the shift when Mercado appears, in general recommended this film (86).

Bibliography