MEN BEHAVING RIDICULOUSLY
The lord of Navarre and three nobles have resolved to retreat and study for three years, eschewing female company: so even the princess suing for land has to be encamped outside the court with her ladies, with messages exchanged more or less comically through interfering underlings. But of course all four men fall in love, break their vows, find one another out in forbidden yearning, break the vow and proceed to be tricked by the wily ladies. In Emily Burns’ s lively, rather overlong production it has been sportily set on a Pacific island and the lords, in shorts and shoulder-sweaters, are the tech bros from Silicon Valley who run our lives now.
Abiola Owokonira ‘s prince is good and Luke Thompson as Berowne (an RSC debut) is the life and engine of the Lords group, and the only one showing some depth of intelligence, while Melanie-Joyce Bermudez, also new here, carries real dignity as the Princess, even in the scenes where she is amid her gigglingly Instagrammy gal-pals. But It’s an odd play, early Shakespeare; overrich with wordplay and banter (indeed it has the longest madeup word in the canon, ‘honorificabilitudinitatibus’. That crops up in one of the more entertaining moments between Tony Gardner’s surefootedly funny Holofernes and his underling (Nathan Foad as Costard, generally seen in chaotic remnants of a spa-day wrapper). There is a comedy Spanish idiot called Don Armadio, shamelessly overdone in tight tennis kit by Jack Bardoe, and a lot of physical comedy elsewhere, most effective in the hiding scene where up and down the palace staircases and trees the four lords spy on each other. Jordan Metcalfe’s Boyet is reliably funny, and at one point does the same terrified squeeze-past as he did in the same director’s Jack Absolute.
For Shakespearian interest it is useful: here are prefigurings of later plays: disguises, overhearings, Mercutioid banter, clever shrewish womanhood outwitting men, classical references, a play within a play messed up by underlings. But it hasnt the tautness and pace of the great plays, and the director does little to tighten it,: a lot of the allusive wordplay needs cutting to keep a modern audience halfway content and up with the story. Last time it surfaced here was in a brilliant double with Much Ado, and set on the eve of WW1, which gave pathos to the stoey of overheated young men and their delusions about love and women. This one is baggier, more pleased with itself, indulging every red-nose physicality. There are moments when you suspect, sitting in the big theatre, that this production’s very presence there is sending a smug message like the M & S ad which presumed too royally on respect: as if it was saying “This is not just larks with background ukeleles and actors gurning and doing silly voices and messing around in beachwear – this is ROYAL SHAKESPEARE actors gurning and larking around in beachwear. Therefore it must be good.”
And you think OK, inconsequential as the story is and overblown the playing-for-laughs and real golf-buggy antics, they will come to a resolution, surely? They will move the heart as even great comedies do, and earn our forgiveness for the longeurs between the good jokes over three hours, and the almost unbearable final dressing- up- box sequence of classical-sixth-form jokes about Pompey , Hercules and Hector.
In the famously shock ending, when news that the Princess’ father king has suddenly died and all revels and wooings are postponed for a year and a day, that redemption almost happens: suddenly the Princess stands crowned above, and the ensemble sing, bery beautifully, a Polynesian hymn of homage and nationhood. And you leave wishing you’d stayed as engaged as that all through. Not least because a fine cast deserved a tighter, better show.
Rsc.org.uk to 18 May
Rating 3. Just.