Love's Labour's Lost (review)

Presented by Carving In Ice Theatre at The Playhouse, Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts, Hamilton, New Zealand. November 15–21, 2016. Presented as part of the Biennial Conference of the Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association. Direction and production by Gaye Poole. Costumes by Cherie Cooke. Lighting by Alec Forbes. With Liam Hinton (Costard), Calum Hughes (Berowne), David Lumsden (Sir Nathaniel), Anna Mahon (Rosaline), Conor Maxwell (Boyet), Kelly Petersen (Moth), Mary Rinaldi (Princess of France), Bianca Rogers-Mott (Jacquenetta), Tycho Smith (King of Navarre), Sara Young (Holofernia), and others.

Imagine a production of Love's Labour's Lost in which the most memorable roles are Moth and Jacquenetta. So it was for me after seeing a beguiling performance of the play given by Carving In Ice Theatre, a company based in Hamilton, New Zealand. Their work typically brings together experienced amateurs with actors drawn from students and faculty of the University of Waikato. According to her program notes, director Gaye Poole deliberately chose a Shakespeare play not often performed in New Zealand, and one that allowed her "to cast … more women than in many Shakespeare plays." In keeping with this aim, the roles of Holofernes, Moth, and the gamekeeper were played by women, with Holofernes becoming Holofernia. Poole gave her predominantly young company time to live and grow with the play: table readings and discussions about what to cut began in May, with rehearsals proper starting in June. The period of working on the comedy thus spanned from the beginning of winter through to an Antipodean spring, allowing time, in Poole's words, "to really absorb, understand and savor the play."

The action unfolded on a playing area surrounded by audience on three sides, backed by a frons scenae with a narrow railed gallery ascended by two long ladders. The space was used to excellent effect in the eavesdropping scene (4.3) where first Berowne, then the youthful King of Navarre, and finally Longaville and Dumaine confess their overthrow by Love, after the visit to court by the Princess of France and her three ladies. Carving In Ice played it as a night-time scene: initially Berowne descended to the stage via the stage-left ladder, clad in a silk paisley dressing-gown, clutching a lantern and his incriminating "paper." At the entrance of the King from below, similarly attired and equipped, Berowne swiftly ascended the left-hand ladder to the gallery, from whence he viewed his friends' serial confessions "[l]ike a demigod … in the sky" (4.3.74). The theatrical pleasure accruing from this staging, with Berowne descending a second time to upbraid his companions for breaking their mutual vow, was capped by the exposure of his own guiltiness in the "letter" brought by Jacquenetta and Costard; it made up for the lack of rhetorical power in Calum Hughes's delivery of Berowne's great speech celebrating Love.

Kelly Petersen played Moth as a nimble, quick-witted page, with a mellifluous voice, truly, as her master Don Armado declares, "a most acute juvenal—voluble and free of grace" (3.1.57). Her performance as the infant Hercules in the Pageant of the Nine Worthies, grappling with a lime-green snake that writhed and wreathed itself about her, was a comic tour de force. Petersen was well matched by mature actor Phil Dalziel, whose slightness of stature and oddly Hispanicized accent brought a gentleness to Don Armado's grandiose aspirations. In Dalziel's performance, as so often in this production, ridiculousness made itself endearing. This was borne out by Sara Young's Holofernia and David Lumsden's Sir Nathaniel, an odd couple in whom pedantry was reborn as singularity. In act four, scene two, for instance, eulogizing to Nathaniel and Dull the Princess's shooting of a deer, Holofernia threw herself into embodying the scuttling of a crab "on the face of terra, the soil, the land, the earth" (4.2.6), then, belying age, she showed in a gleefully balletic leap how "'sorel' jumps from thicket" (4.2.5–4). Young's whole hearted, never ironized performance deservedly elicited Nathaniel's "A rare talent!" (4.2...