Ryan JW Smith’s original play impressed critics all round at last year’s Fringe. With four- and five-star Edinburgh reviews and a London run under its belt, the hit Shakespearean-style comedy is back with modest script changes, an all-female cast and an incongruous anti-war monologue dropped in among the rhyming couplets.
Just as the bard himself is ever our contemporary, Love Labours Won addresses man’s enduring dilemma of responsible monogamy versus free-spirited debauchery. “Can faithlessness in man be called a crime?” asks one of our protagonists, and as he unpicks his quandary we see some of the Globe’s finest traditions replayed: strong, resourceful women, hoodwinked noblemen, gender-bending tomfoolery – this play has them all.
Smith, in daring “to chase the canon of the bard” shows himself as master of the iambic pentameter and rhyming prose. He cleverly matches Shakespeare at his own game with an engaging script that is faithful to its 16th-century muse but takes a dash of today’s vernacular. The all-female cast is a gamble that breaks even. Their performances are zesty and the lines roll smoothly along, but we are always aware that our men in tights are really women. The resulting product can’t quite lose the trace of pantomime, and it crosses the line from classic Elizabethan comedy to parody. But a fine parody it is.
4/5
Alan Cox
