Review: Love’s Labour’s Lost (more or less), Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot

You know the kind of thing you’re getting with a Shakespearean comedy. Lovers falling out with each other amid some crossed wires. Someone (usually a hapless male) dressing up in ridiculous fashion. Mistaken identity, often resulting from the aforementioned dressing up. It’s a bit like an Elizabethan version of how nobody can tell Clark Kent is Superman because he wears glasses.

All of these things are present in this new co-production of Love’s Labour’s Lost by Shakespeare North and Scarborough-based Stephen Joseph Theatre. What’s missing, hence the ‘more or less’ caveat in this version’s title, is most of the Shakespearean dialogue, the script having been adapted by Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane to place this mostly modern language version in 1990s Ibiza.

Alyce Liburd, Annie Kirkman. Credit Patch Dolan.

Here we have Ferdy’s stag do, having sworn to avoid women during the Balearic break, inadvertently crossing paths with his beloved Yvette and her hens who have been diverted from their intended sojourn in Malaga. The tourist season is reaching its end, and the resort in which they find themselves is hosting a ‘fiesta’, complete with Blind Date and Stars in Their Eyes competitions for guests. Meanwhile, assorted letters, amorous and otherwise, reach the wrong recipients. You can imagine the rest – and that is kind of the problem here. Strip out the Bard’s word play and the historical interest that generates, and his plot is revealed to be thin at best and, at worst, faintly irritating.

The Ibiza setting is a fun idea, but with a range of 90s musical numbers thrown into the mix, this production all becomes a bit panto in places – yet not consistently so – as well as too long. Some of the musical performances add genuine humour to proceedings, Armando (David Kirkbride)’s rendition of Britney Spears’ Hit Me Baby being one of them. Others seem weirdly chosen. A straight rendition of Nilsson’s Without You is neither quite funny nor genuinely romantic, while Aerosmith, Boys II Men and Cher’s Shoop Shoop Song seem like an improbable Ibiza playlist (yes, Vengaboys also make an appearance).

Timothy Adam Lucas gives an energetic, physical performance as the well-meaning, temporarily scorned lover (tick!) Ferdy, and Kirkbride gets laughs as the hapless (tick!) Armando. Game Boys, flip phones and paintballing (which somehow seems like a deeply Blair-era activity) all add to the nostalgia, in their own way ticking off a different checklist entitled ‘references to include in a 90s-themed play’. You know what you’re getting on that front, too.

Ardent fans of Love’s Labour’s Lost will likely find interest in the reimagining of its various elements on a different canvas. For me, it felt a little paint by numbers.