An atmospheric setting, beautiful costumes, lovely songs, hilarious clowning and Shakespeare’s eloquent wit throughout make this performance an unmissable summer evening's entertainment, says Janice Windle
Such a delight on a fine summer’s evening to enter the fantastic world of a Shakespeare comedy under the huge trees of the University of Law Gardens, Guildford. This production sets us down in 1939, in a world only just between wars. Young wealthy intellectuals like the Bloomsbury Group can party, flirt and banter, play pranks on each other, and make promises they can’t keep, without a thought for the future – until the future suddenly shows its face. Shakespeare’s play was probably written about 1595, when fear of the Spanish Armada, rather than the Luftwaffe, brought the fun and games to an end.
The plot is complicated and farcical, and a vehicle for thoughts on the place of love and intellectualism in masculine lives. Four aristocratic young men with pretensions to being artists and intellectuals have sworn to give up all the pleasures of the flesh, including young ladies. But they find themselves tempted by the Princess of France and three other aristocratic young women who have no other aim than to tease and distract them. The resulting hilarity, as the men struggle (but not too hard) to resist these sirens, gives plenty of opportunity for brilliant repartee and clowning by the whole company.
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Elaine Claxton, Robert Maskell, Chris Porter, Gavin Fowler, James Sheldon
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Paula James, Sarah Gobran, Sally Cheng, Natasha Rickman
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This play is very much about words. Matt Pinches has ample rein for his special talents: as Don Adriano de Armado, a posturing Spanish refugee, he mangles the English language to great effect, and his matador poses had us weeping with laughter. James Sheldon is irresistibly funny as Holofernes, the pedantic school teacher. Costard the cook’s relationship with her assistant and her employers yields fine comic acting by Paula James who has a great line in cynical asides and dismissive tosses of the head. Gavin Fowler as Berowne, the most thoughtful of the boys, eloquently delivers some of Shakespeare’s finest meditations on love.
I loved the staging of scenes where all the young men go swimming and rowing – air-swimming amongst the audience, each in his own style. Biggest laugh belonged to non-swimmer Dumaine’s efforts in a wooden ring, and his struggles to get out of the “water”.
Unusually for a Shakespearean comedy, the play doesn’t end with everyone getting married on-stage. There’s a shadow over the ending which Tom Littler, the director, handles well. At the height of a mad party to celebrate the men’s admitting they are abandoning their resolutions, news arrives that the Princess’s father has died and war is coming. The sudden chill over the stage isn’t just the cool night air: the mood changes dramatically as the weddings that have been planned are postponed while the husbands-to-be go to war – and to work on the task of changing themselves from boys into men.
Tickets: guildford-shakespeare-company.co.uk
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