All the King’s men – and a jaunt to Club Tropicana
Love’s Labour’s Lost
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Until May 18, 2hrs 45mins ★★★★★ Machinal The Old Vic, London Until June 1, 1hr 50mins ★★★★★
Love’s Labour’s Lost goes tropical! The director is clearly a fan of the HBO series The White Lotus. This is set in a spa among the palm trees, where the king and his male cronies, for the sake of study, decide to go without women for three whole years. Great idea. Until a posse of elegant foreign ladies turns up.
It’s a romcom at the expense of chaps whose best intentions ‘the tongues of mocking wenches’ derail. The male pack is led by Berowne, nicely played by Bridgerton’s Luke Thompson, who at one point is stripped down to his Calvin Klein underpants. The princess (Melanie-Joyce Bermudez) leads the sunbathing, be-towelled women, with Ioanna Kimbook as the ‘celestial’ Rosaline. Resident buffoon is Jack Bardoe’s tennis pro Don Armado, Nathan Foad is a funny, camp Costard and Tony Gardner is flawless as Holofernes, the resident pedant.
The emphasis here is on froth. Subtle it isn’t – and the verse speaking is erratic. The men entertain the women while disguised as knights in armour, singing I Want It That Way like some medieval boy band. There’s room for that number but not, alas, for the famous song Shakespeare wrote at the end of the play – a wintry blast of rural Englishness.
That said, Emily Burns is never a boring director and this is a lively rendition of a verbose play, staged on a lush Pacific island retreat designed by Joanna Scotcher. For the opening show under new RSC management, it’s a qualified thumbs-up.
Machinal opens with lots of jerky ‘expressionist’ movement in the 1928 play by Sophie Treadwell. The initial performance style is off-putting, but the story, based on an account of the murderer Ruth Snyder, grips like a vice.
That’s thanks to Rosie Sheehy – terrific as the lowly office worker pestered by her leching boss (Tim Frances). Times are hard so she marries him. The honeymoon is a disaster. When she meets a guy in a speakeasy bar (Pierro Niel-Mee in a charmer part first played by the young Clark Gable) one thing leads to another. She gets the physical love she craves. Her husband gets his head stoved in. By the end she’s inside a cage, in a jail, in a vile circus of rough justice, an electric chair downstage.
Director Richard Jones’s production is full of startling stage effects. But it’s Sheehy’s superb, almost rabid performance that freezes the blood, like one long, silent scream. As you come out, you want to forget it, but you can’t.