Frances McNamee as Maria, Michelle Terry as Rosaline, Jamie Newall as Boyet and Flora Spencer-Longhurst as Katherine in Love's Labour's Lost. Photo / Manuel Harlan
The fact that Shakespeare wrote a play called Love's Labour's Won is beyond dispute, though no copy has been found.
The weight of modern scholarship is behind the argument that it was an alternate name for a play we know.
The Royal Shakespeare Company has gone with the most popular
of several suspects, Much Ado About Nothing, written three years later. They staged it end-on-end with Love's Labour's Lost as a double bill of sorts, with many of the actors appearing in both productions.
Lost is unusual for a comedy, ending as it does both sombrely and on something of a cliffhanger. Their revels interrupted by gloomy news, the quartets of lovers are paired off but not married at the final curtain and director Luscombe's brilliant conception, which locates the action on the eve of the Great War, provides a grim explanation for the delayed gratification they must endure: the last scene is skin-pricklingly moving.
But this is a hugely entertaining production of what its first publisher billed as the "pleasant conceited comedie" about four noblemen whose resolution to shun the company of women (in favour of three years of fasting and study) leads them into a riot of deceit, dissembling and confusion.
