LABOUR OF LOVE
The actors, director and Stratford Festival boss on a beloved Shakespeare comedy,
When Antoni Cimolino was a teenager, he came to Stratford in 1979 to see a play with his high school. It was Love’s Labour’s Lost and it changed his life.
“I saw for the first time the power theatre could have in reflecting our own lives back at us across the centuries,” says Cimolino, now artistic director of the Stratford Festival, where the latest production of this timeless comedy opens on Aug. 14.
“In this play by Shakespeare, I saw all my friends from school up there on the stage. The goofy kid, the cool one, the sarcastic one, the shy one. All of us. And even at that early age, I began to understand about the continuing voyage of being a person, with all the pain and pleasure involved in it.” No wonder Cimolino wanted to program the play on the Festival stage once he became artistic director in 2012, but he waited for the right person to do it. And he felt he had finally found him in John Caird.
The world-renowned director — best known for his work on the original productions of Nicholas Nickleby and Les Misérables — was born in Edmonton, spent his childhood in Montreal, then moved to England at the age of 11, where he has become one of that country’s most esteemed stagers of plays, with a huge body of work at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre, as well as around the world.
“I love this play,” says Caird, 66, on a break during previews. “It’s obviously very Shakespearean but yet, in other ways it’s so unique. It’s completely naturalistic. There’s nothing supernatural in it, no ghosts, no sprites, no deus ex machina to set things right.
“It’s also a very democratic play that gives equal time to all its many characters and isn’t controlled by any one of them. It’s the nearest thing Shakespeare ever wrote to a Chekhov play and both men knew that comedy is always a little better when it’s tinged with tears.”
Caird also loves the strength of the women in the play. “The Princess of France has a wonderful speech about the power of women, but Shakespeare follows through on it all the way to the end. “The women keep the men and their proposals of marriage at arm’s length and tell them they have to prove their love in a more fierce fire than the one they’ve been burning in during the play’s action.”
Caird pauses. “I think the play is ultimately about worth. The true worth of love, the true worth of words, the true worth of a promise. What is a true labour of love worth to a man or to a woman?
“The play also questions how much academic knowledge can really be worth as well. Berowne speaks movingly about how it doesn’t help you to enjoy a night sky more if you know all the names of the stars.”
And there’s a final message that Caird feels rings even truer today, with the cyberworld and its barrage of information. “However much you know, it doesn’t anesthetize you to pain and loss, and it doesn’t immunize you from the problem of love and falling in love.” Love’s Labour’s Lost runs at the Festival Theatre, 55 Queen St., Stratford until Oct. 9. Go to stratfordfestival.ca or phone 1-800-567-1600 for information.