Old Play in Manhattan

Love's Labour's Lost (by William Shakespeare) opened the season at Manhattan's City Center with a gay splash. The play is minor and rather poky Shakespeare, last seen on Broadway in the 1890s; but the present revival, if a dubious choice, takes a daring form. Love's Labour is offered as an elegant Edwardian frolic, half satiric comedy, half court masque. Alexander Pope was told of his translation of the Iliad: "A very pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer." Perhaps the City Center should not call this Shakespeare; perhaps the audience even puts up with the play for the sake of the props. But in any case, it is fun.

Shakespeare's tale of the King of Navarre and three young lords who forswear women for study, only for the Princess of France and three young ladies to come calling, is all satiric sideshows and sashayings, mixups and false beards. In the present production, the frills are multiplied--croquet games, early gramophones and automobiles, tea on the lawn, pink coats and blazers. At the start it seems rather chichi and cute, but in time it creates, and sustains, a genuine atmosphere.

The idea of a sort of highborn Oxford, circa 1900, fits the play's alfresco gaieties, elaborate forms, donnish humor and prankish but decorous lovemaking. In individual roles, such players as Joseph Schildkraut and Philip Bourneuf enliven the proceedings. The speeches at times are blurred, but the play's peculiarly Shakespearean finale, with its melancholy charm, is beautifully achieved. Says one of the lovers:

Our wooing doth not end like an old

play; Jack hath not Jill.

Yet, in spite of the departing ladies, love's labor is not entirely lost: the swains may seek them again in a twelvemonth. Here at least Love's Labour's Lost is the true text of Shakespeare, even if elsewhere a mere pretext for shenanigans.

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