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Love’s Labour’s Lost review – paella, bullfighting and flamenco make Shakespeare’s farce a fiesta
['Mark Lawson']
Guardian Middle East
Tom Littler, in alfresco stagings playing this summer in Guildford and Richmond, pairs the seemingly incomplete piece with Much Ado About Nothing (which some believe to be an otherwise lost Shakespeare piece called Love’s Labour’s Won), unifying the characters and plot lines.
Apart from also being outdoors, Indiana Lown-Collins’s revival for Shakespeare’s Globe is an equally but differently radical revision.
However, had Shakespeare pricked his patron in the way this production adds, Love’s Labour’s Lost would have been his final play, the other 29 lost to us.
I would be concerned about students and tourists leaving the Globe admiring Shakespeare’s Elizabethan lèse-majesté, and such is the power of Littler’s double bill that Love’s Labour’s Lost played alone now feels even more half-hearted.
At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 13 September