(Untitled)

[clanwilliam]

Love's Labour's Lost: the play that really really needed a script editor.

Discuss.

Comments

[ingenious76]

So does A Midsummer Night's Dream. Whilst the Shakespearean tragedies/histories are pretty tightly paced, a the comedies always seem to drift off. Much Ado About Nothing could have done with some editing as well.

[clanwilliam]

I'm just back from the RSC, and it was the understudies' performance - the only one this particular company got to do in public.

And... they were fantastic. Not a huge amount of rehearsal time, lack of polish in the performance at times but that was balanced by the huge enthusiasm and energy. An absolutely cracking cast, and one of those performances that leaves you wondering - while they would have benefited from more rehearsal time, they might have lost some of what made it such a fun performance.

But the play itself? It's got some fantastic language in it, but fantastic language is not enough when your bum is going numb and you want to yell "get on with it!" at the characters, only to have the second bit compressed into nearly no time at all.

I now think of it as Will Shakespeare: the RTD years.

[burntcopper]

good god, yes. You can tell it's his first rom-com. All the versions i've seen are... they just trail off. My fave version is still the Branagh version where he chucked half the script out of the window, replaced it with song and dance numbers, and did top and tail newsreels.