“We’re trying to recreate some of the excitement, some of the fun, some of the anarchy and sensuality that we have at the Globe.” That’s Dominic Dromgoole, director of Shakespeare’s Love Labour’s Lost, which played in London’s Globe Theatre last summer and is now on a U.S. tour. It stops in the Valley this weekend on its way to New York.
Like the Globe of Shakespeare’s time, the modern replica on the banks of the Thames is open to the sky, with a brightly painted thrust stage that’s almost entirely surrounded by the audience, many of them standees who crowd right up to the platform like the “groundlings” of old. This week’s performances, in Holyoke’s War Memorial, come closer to the Globe’s staging than most of the tour venues with their traditional proscenium stages. The seating is on three sides, with the front row in touching range of the stage.
The production uses traditional costuming, music and dance—no postmodern revisioning here, a la Kenneth Branagh’s camped-up 2000 movie version, done as a 1930s musical with Gershwin and Porter songs. But the Globe’s staging still strives to be engaging and accessible for a contemporary audience—an especially tricky task with this particular comedy, which has been described as “perhaps the most relentlessly Elizabethan of all Shakespeare’s plays.” Its language is certainly the Bard’s most highly stylized, brimming with literary conceits, obscure topical references and elaborate wordplay (including the title itself, whose meaning shifts depending on where you place the apostrophes).
Love’s Labour’s Lost is a fairly early Shakespearean work, probably written not for the public stage but for a royal entertainment, its verbal pyrotechnics designed to tickle the aristocratic ear and showcase the chops of an ambitious young poet. But the director assures us that “the essence of our production is to involve the audience” with lots of physical humor and a spirited approach to a shamelessly silly plot worthy of Gilbert and Sullivan.
This one finds the King of Navarre (a medieval realm in what are now parts of France and Spain) and three young noblemen taking an oath to forswear for a time all worldly pleasures—including the company of women—and devote themselves to austerity and study. They’ve hardly tried on their hair shirts when who should arrive but the Princess of France and (what a coincidence!) her three maids-in-waiting.
Romantic madness ensues, as the lords fall for the ladies and try, unsuccessfully, to hide their wooing from each other, while the women mock them mercilessly for breaking their vow. There are several comic subplots and a slew of eccentric characters, including a pair of pedantic schoolmasters and a “fantastical” Spaniard, a classic example of one of Shakespeare’s favorite comic foils, the cowardly braggart. In the end, though, love’s labor is indeed lost, at least temporarily, as the couples are suddenly separated, obliging the men to go through with their ascetic enterprise.
The production’s two leads embody the Globe’s respectful-but-lively approach to the material. Michelle Terry (seen here last summer in the NT Live cinema broadcast of the National Theatre’s Phedre) and Tristan Gravelle are rising stars whose performances have none of the formal diction we associate with Shakespearean Brits. Gravelle, in fact, is a Welshman and retains the rolling lilt of his homeland.
The Holyoke performances are sponsored by MIFA, the Massachusetts International Festival of the Arts, a presenter dedicated to bringing the world’s performing arts to the Valley. Turning the venerable War Memorial Auditorium into an approximation of Shakespeare’s Globe can be seen as a metaphor for MIFA’s mission to help revive the city, a place with a dynamic past and the potential for a revitalized future.
Love’s Labour’s Lost: Dec. 3-5, War Memorial Auditorium, 310 Appleton St., Holyoke, 540-0200, www.mifafestival.org.
A Matter of Perspective
Another play about French royalty opens at Smith College this weekend. Las Meninas isn’t a fanciful romance, though, but a historical conjecture that, as one reviewer has said, could almost be a tabloid headline: “French Queen Has Black Dwarf’s Baby.”
In the mid-1600s, an African dwarf called Nabo was purchased by Louis XIV, the Sun King, as a court jester to amuse his queen, Maria-Teresa of Spain. Some historical records hint that the queen had a secret affair with the dwarf and gave birth to a mixed-race daughter who was spirited away to a convent where she lived out her life. Lynn Nottage’s play dramatically imagines this episode which, like so much of the history of subjected peoples, has been erased from the official record. Nottage won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for her drama Ruined, which investigates an overlooked chapter in contemporary African history. She has said, “As an African-American writer, that is why I am here—to track down those stories.”
Nottage’s title derives from a painting by the 17th-century Spanish artist Diego Velasquez. “Las Meninas” (“The Maids of Honor”) is an enigmatic masterpiece, a portrait of the Spanish royal family and their servants—including two dwarfs—in which the painter himself appears and the subjects are seen from a variety of perspectives. The play, performed at Smith by a mostly student cast, is similarly fragmented. It’s narrated by the mixed-race daughter as a story she tells her fellow novitiates in the convent.
There’s also a court painter who observes the royal family from an outsider’s vantage point. And we share the thoughts of the illicit couple, both of them also outsiders—he a slave uprooted from his home (the production nicely contrasts the stately gavottes of the French court with Nabo’s private, rhythmic dance), she an unwilling bride given in marriage to seal a peace treaty between France and Spain.
History, the play tells us, is a matter of perspective. As the director, Ellen Kaplan, puts it, “Who tells the story—or not—determines what the story is.” Las Meninas is the playwright’s attempt to add a page to the history book by giving voice to hitherto silent players on the world’s stage.
Las Meninas: Dec. 3-5 and 9-12, Hallie Flanagan Studio Theatre, Smith College, Green St., Northampton, 585-ARTS (2787), www.smith.edu/smitharts.
