presents:


William Shakespeare's


Love's Labour's Lost




Love's Labour's Lost presents a world of games: characters delight in elaborate wordplay, scholars compete as conquerors of knowledge, lords and ladies flirt behind masks, and ordinary men pretend to be heroes.



And yet the circle of play is fragile.
Players have to agree to follow the rules, and the outside world beyond the magic sphere has to be kept at bay.
Often, even in the midst of games, there is the lingering sense that we are only pretending". Shakespeare's play bristles with interruptions from within and without.



Sceptical Lord Berowne is reluctant to join in the King's vow, that the men of court study in seclusion for three ears, "not see ladies, fast, not 1 ' w long y
" w leep"! The arrival of the Princess of
France
and her lovely friends quickly interrupts the lords' scholarly pretences.
The women then interrupt the very love games they inspire, poking fun at the men's moony clich6s. And the lords, put roundly to shame, mock in turn the common folks' earnest pageant presenting worthy men. How foolish, to play at heroes of antiquity!



Meanwhile, death, the greatest interruption of all, hovers at the edges. Marcade, messenger of sad news, breaks up the merriment and forces the characters to cast off their holiday humour. We step out of the circle of games, back into a world of speechless sick and winter wind, "when blood is nipped and ways be foul, when nightly sings the staring owl". And yet somehow this rawness in the season's grit refreshes, after the antic fireworks of fantasy.