Love’s Labours Lost by Katyboo

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy. I hesitate to mention yet again the whole comedy = dancing rule, as I have rarely shared with you any comedy with a dance in it for your delight.  And this is not about to deliver on the dancing front either, unless you watch the execrable film version by Kenneth Branagh, set in a 1930’s musical dancing hell.

 

Unlike our recent outing into All’s Well That Ends Well, this is not a comedy made of odds and ends. It is a comedy with an odd end.

 

It is a peculiar play, mostly unpopular in these modern times when the furthest contemporary vocabulary inventiveness stretches is to ‘innit?’ and ‘incha’ and ‘fookinell’.  It is a play full of words.

 

Now here you are probably thinking, ‘that Katyboo, bless her, she doesn’t get out much, and too much lemon curd cake was bound to affect her in the end,’ etc.  Yes. I am aware that all the plays are full of words.  Particularly the four hour gallop through Hamlet.  And, if you are choosing your Shakespeare on the length of time you will be required to utilise your sitting bone, this is one of the shortest.  Although I’d advise you not to get too excited. You’re still in for a good two hour trot.

 

On the word front, it is very like the Emperor faced with a precocious Mozart and his love of twiddly bits…’Too many notes…’ and it certainly brings to my mind the disastrous time I persuaded my father to come and watch The Merry Wives of Windsor because it had Bergerac in it.  After three hours in which nary a burgundy sports car or leather bomber jacket whizzed across the stage, and it looked nothing like crime ridden Jersey, my father’s only comment on leaving was: ‘Too many words…’

 

The issue with words in this play is that it is loaded with sophisticated Elizabethan style banter, lots of complex poetry which is meant to be both hilarious and thought provoking, and about four hundred million puns, symbols and other elaborate verbal badinage, most of which whizzes over a modern theatregoer’s head like a low flying mallard.  You just have to bear with it.  A big handicap is the fact that Elizabethans thought that punning was just about the most sophisticated comic device known to man, and we associate it with Ken Dodd and end of the pier variety shows by men wearing bad wigs and shouting; ‘Boom! Boom!’

 

As we know, I do not do puns, banter or tricky poetry that requires Stephen Fry to explain it to our dulled brains.  So we should be fine.  Let’s stick with the facts ma’am and get trucking.

 

We are trucking over to Navarre to the court of King Ferdinand.  Those of you who were paying attention in the last master class will remember the golden rule for all plays with incomprehensible behaviour in.  Make the participants foreign and all shall be well.  This play has taken this rule on board in spades.  We have Navarre and his fellow Navarrians.  We have stupid Spanish people who aren’t from Navarre and foxy French fillies.  It’s all go here as regards entente cordiale and the EU would probably give this play a grant were someone trying to write it now.

 

King Ferdinand is a serious young fellow.  He doesn’t really like being king. It’s all rather tedious and long winded.  And after having stumbled across some of Shakespeare’s old manuscripts in which kings feature heavily he has gone off the whole thing.  Frankly he’s as nervous as a cat in a blender about the whole malarkey.  He has only just had his hair done. He has no wish to lose his head or be deposed by lunatic daughters’ intent on disembowelling and eating him.  He’s never liked witches or blood and he just can’t drum up the enthusiasm.

 

He was a sickly, bespectacled child whose mother refused to let him go out and play rugby with the rough boys.  She rubbed his chest with goose grease, wrapped him in brown paper and monitored his bowel movements using a spreadsheet.  By the time his late father took any interest and packed him off to boarding school to get a spine, it was all too late for Navarre.

 

Instead of a glittering career rowing, rubbing boys tousled heads with his knuckles and drinking forty eight pints of Old Peculiar whilst balancing a glass on his head he joined the chess club and took an interest in Dungeons and Dragons.  His mother wrote a note to excuse him from sports and he could be found on most afternoons curled up in the library reading books with his equally swotty friends.

 

The only reason he didn’t get minced alive by Drummer Harris and his cohorts was the fact that one day he was going to be king and could have them all executed.

 

So now he’s king, and he’s trying desperately to think up a way to wriggle out of banquets, kissing babies and being enthusiastic about native dancing and cheese factories.  He has a mortal fear of hair nets and industrial strength wellington boots, and his palms sweat when he is nervous.  It is all too horrible to contemplate.

 

After several days of hard thinking he comes up with just the ticket. He decides that he will set up an exclusive university with the sole purpose of learning many wise and important things that a good king should know.  In case he gets bored, he will invite his three best friends to join him in the pursuit of wisdom.  He will also create a veritable web of incomprehensible rules regarding the governing of said academy which should neatly get round the chance that any cheesemongers wearing hair nets might want to join for example. It has nothing to do with not kissing babies. Nothing at all. Honest guv’nor.

 

Nobody is taken in by this elaborate ruse.  But what’s to be done?  He’s the king.  While he is busy setting up his ivory tower and persuading his friends that what they want more than anything else in the world is to go back to school, the rest of the country is burying their gold in the garden, writing wills and working out the best way to the border avoiding all main roads.  With this kind of a king, the country is sure to go to hell in a bucket before the next six months is up.  There are rumours that Drummer Harris is massing on the borders and when he takes the throne it will be double P.E. every Thursday and no let off, even if you have got asthma.

 

Navarre is blithely unaware of all this and has just invited his friends to the swearing of their oath of fealty to him and his university.  What fun.

 

His friends, Dumaine, Longaville and Berowne were initially very enthusiastic.  They love Navarre. They are absolutely chuffed to conkers that this is the only kingdom in the entire planet that is being ruled by a geek.  As geeks themselves, and friends to the chief geek, they have been looking forward to all the perks that being the geeky friends of the most powerful man in the kingdom will bring.  They had visions of staying up all night drinking Crème de Menthe frappe’s, not wearing vests and talking about Schrodingers Cat and string theory with women with big breasts.  They don’t care about the fact that the women are only interested in their power and money.  They just want to be near to big breasts. 

 

And up to now it has all been going swimmingly.  Unfortunately Navarre has also been unnerved by the proximity of predatory women with large mammaries.  They are crushing his head.  Add to that the fact that his mother keeps showing him pictures of princesses that look like horses and talking about babies.  All it needs is a picture of a horsey woman in a hairnet eating cheese and clutching a baby and his worse nightmare will be upon him.  He has come to the realisation that he is quite keen on the idea of women, but that the reality is far too alarming and fleshy and must be avoided at all costs.

 

 To this end he has, quite deliberately, put a clause in the oath that in order to be accepted into his university, all of his friends must swear off women for three years.  The idea first came to him on a disastrous all boys together adventure to the Stephen Hawking memorial lecture hall last Thursday week.  Sherries were served at the reception afterwards and after having gotten a little the worse for wear, all the men were rebuffed cruelly by some hot physics babes from the university who laughed at their theories and were not in the slightest bit impressed by crowns.

 

They had retired to the Eldorado cocktail lounge to nurse their resentment over some flaming sambuca and jelly babies when Navarre came up with the idea of the vow of celibacy.  At the time, suffering from collectively crushed egos that looked like the worst horse and cart wreck ever on the main Navarre road it seemed like a brilliant idea.  Now that they are about to sign their lives away and retreat into the pearly gates of academe it does not seem so appealing.  Particularly to Berowne who has a secret crush on Navarre’s mum and gets a bit of a thrill from humiliation.

 

After quite a lot of fierce debate in which Berowne insists on mentioning girls and the lack thereof more times than is comfortable, and Navarre has to raise the stakes with the old, ‘I am the king you know,’ routine, Berowne backs down.  He is not entirely convinced by the king’s promise of raucous nights of entertainment provided by his clown Costard, a crazy Spanish nobleman called Don Adriano de Armado and his pageboy Moth. 

He has also read Shakespeare and is not convinced that clowns are that funny.  What can he do?  His only revenge on signing the fateful oath is to remind Navarre that it’s all well and good to swear off the presence of women within a five mile radius of the court, but Navarre has to meet the princess of France tomorrow on a diplomatic mission regarding the position of Aquitaine and other such royal matters.  He’s got himself into a right pickle now, hasn’t he?

 

Navarre had forgotten this.  He has a Homer ‘Doh!’ moment and then decides that as he is the king and it’s too bloody late to back down now without looking like a right Charlie to his mates he has to go along with it.  He doesn’t care about looking like a right Charlie to the princess of France.  After all, she’ll be at least five miles away and hopefully if he cocks it up, he will never have to see her again.

 

Navarre is now having one of his turns, and keeps visualising bosoms wrapped in cheese looming on the horizon.  He goes to bed with a headache.

 

Navarre wakes up hoping his nightmares about French princesses have been just that.  Unfortunately, before he can toast his morning crumpet and get down to a hard morning’s study about whether black cats in black cupboards exist when you’re thinking about tax returns, the page announces that the Princess of France and her ladies’ Rosaline, Maria and Katherine are at the door.  They are kicking up a right how’s your father, wanting to know why they are not being allowed inside for a cup of tea.  The diplomatic mission has started on the most undiplomatic terms in the history of diplomacy ever.

 

Navarre is a bolshy little blighter and hates to be proved wrong. He refuses to admit the princess and says the best he can do is a four man tent and a groundsheet in the field next door.  They can like it or lump it. 

 

The French team have already heard reports on their journey that Navarre is a somewhat eccentric monarch.  They have sent ahead their steward Boyet, who is as gay as ninepence and totally up for a bit of intrigue and mucking about to liven up the day, to assess how mad, mad is.  He comes back and draws a graph of foxes heads on sticks in which he calculates that Navarre’s madness is madnosity plus with added insanity.  On the other hand, underneath the dodgy elephant cords and the bad glasses Boyet reckons that Navarre is a bit of a babe and probably hung like a horse.  He advises the women to stick around and mess with his head.  Finally free of the rigours of French courtly life and after one too many sherries they agree, and get Boyet to do creative things with the groundsheet.  They hunker down and wait for Navarre to show his face.

 

In the meantime Navarre’s vow of celibacy is not going well.  In a fit of pique since the news of the French babes arrival upset his equilibrium he has forced everyone he has ever known to sign it, including his father’s hunting dog and a man called Cyril who was just passing through.  Costard has signed it in the full knowledge that his clownship is a get out of jail free card and because everyone thinks he’s a half wit he can do whatever he likes.  Don Armado has signed it because he is a half wit and just likes signing things.  Last week he got nicked for vandalising a bus stop in a fit of over enthusiastic signing.

 

Costard has not let his vow of celibacy stop him wooing a big bosomed, come hither peasant called Jacquenetta.  All is going great guns until Don Armado spots her, falls for her ample charms and decides that he is going to have her for himself.  He rats out Costard to the celibacy police and Costard gets stuck in the slammer with bread and water for a week.  Don Armado and his faithful Moth bugger off to woo Jacquenetta, who isn’t really bothered who is wooing her frankly, as long as she gets a snog and a free lunch.

 

While all this is going on in the background, Navarre has finally been persuaded that if he doesn’t want to be the shortest ruling monarch in the history of the kingdom then he needs to stop sulking, change out of his pyjamas and go and make nice with the Princess of France.

 

He takes his trusty geek posse with him and ambles off down to the field, taking the longest route possible, kicking gravel with his toe and muttering about princesses who look like horses under his breath.

 

The princess is not used to this kind of neglect and has determined on revenge.  Boyet, who is the Elizabethan Gok Wan, has been put to full use re-styling the already effortlessly glamourous French babes and turning the field into an Elle Decoration photo shoot.

 

Navarre is amazed.  The last time he came down this way the entire field was full of rotting manure and rusting bikes.  Now it is a temple of elegance. He has only just put his tongue back into his head when the princess of France trips forwards and lays on the charm with a trowel.  Navarre is a dead duck.

 

He is in love. He cannot believe that this woman really is a princess. He is extraordinarily cross with his mother.  All the photos she has shown him up to now have looked like something from Spain’s most wanted lists.  Not a woman under the age of forty five and the best feature among them a hairy wart.  He begins to suspect foul play and resolves to cut the apron strings and send his mother on a long cruise to the Galapagos islands for the foreseeable future.

 

Dumaine, Longaville and Berowne are all equally smitten with the foxy French ladies maids and have to stand behind trees grinning like loons to hide their enthusiasm.

 

The ladies, it has to be said, are equally impressed with the men.  Given the fact that this is the first time both parties have been free of parental supervision it is unsurprising that they are enthusiastic.  The men could have looked like Les Dawson and they would have given it their best shot.  Berowne, who was the least enthusiastic celibate to begin with, completely loses his head and in the space of five minutes has cast aside his lustful thoughts for Navarre’s mother and is now mentally moving in with Rosaline.

 

The men go back to the palace, hearts afluster and all vow in deep brown voices that they were not in the slightest bit bothered about stupid girls and were very thankful indeed that Navarre made them sign that oath.  Or who knows what would happen.  Then they go to their rooms to kick the furniture and fantasise about French corsetry in equal measure.

 

The ladies, who are French and therefore a lot more sophisticated, are utterly delighted with the effect they’ve had on the blokes, and are determined to take the advantage and run with it.  They set Boyet up as their spy and send him off to find out what will happen next.

 

In the meantime, Don Armado’s wooing of Jacquenetta is not going well and he decides that the best thing he can do is free his rival, Costard from jail and then pay him to deliver a love letter to her.  Berowne, who has been up all night writing torturously bad poetry to Rosaline, catches Costard just as he is going out the door and pays him to deliver said poetry to his lady love.  Naturally, in a side splittingly comic turn of events, the letters get mixed up.  A veritable ‘Whoops, there go my bloomers,’ moment.

 

Jacquenetta can’t read.  She takes her letter to the wise Sir Nathaniel and the school teacher Holofernes, who are only in the play because two of Shakespeare’s bezzie mates wanted parts and he promised to write them in.  Sir Nathaniel realises it is the wrong letter and tells Jacquenetta to give it to Navarre.  The jig is up for Berowne. In the meantime, Boyet has realised the love letter for Rosalind is actually for Jacquenetta.  He has no sense of propriety and opens it anyway, much to the hilarity of the whole French camp and everyone wets their pants laughing at peasant lurve in all its lurid glory.

 

Navarre is very cross with Berowne’s oath breaking naughtiness and punishes him until he realises that Berowne has given him the perfect excuse to ignore the vow and get away with it.  At which point all pretence at celibacy is abandoned, and the men set up a poetry factory in the Mills and Boon stylings, and bombard the poor French women with execrable verse and unsuitably naff love tokens by the bucket load.

 

After a week of constant plighting and sighin they decide that the fillies will be softened up enough, and that it is time to visit them and demand kisses and licks.  For some reason, probably the fact that they are all cowardly and cannot quite erase the mental damage of being laughed at by a load of lady physicists, they decide that the best way to go about this wooing is to disguise themselves as a bunch of Russian Cossacks.  That will learn them.  All ladies like visits by Russian Cossacks.  Navarre has heard this from his mother.  Unfortunately he has still not gotten round to taking his own advice and packing her off to the Galapagos islands.  She is taking her revenge and sits in her turret pissing her pants at the thought of her son rushing about the countryside dressed in a large fur hat and trousers that make him look like he’s done a big pooh.  She is convinced that the French princess will reject him out of hand and he will come home to mummy like all good boys should.

 

She has not banked on the wily and cunning ways of Boyet, who is now so in at Navarre’s court he has his own knife and fork.  Boyet gets wind of this ridiculous plan, and being a big soft nancy at heart, he decides to help the stricken men.  He rushes off to the princess and gives her the skinny.  He advises her that if she ever wants true love she’s going to have to go along with Navarre’s foibles and book a one way ticket to the Galapagos islands for his mother as soon as she gets her royal feet under Navarre’s table.  In the meantime there is nothing to say that they cannot see how much messing they can do with kingly heads to pass the time.

 

The men have decided that they will know the princesses because they will, of course, be wearing all the love tokens that they have been shuttling down to the field all week.  The ladies simply swap tokens and wear burglar masks and then allow themselves to be erroneously wooed by the wrong suitors just for a laugh.

 

The men retreat, thinking all went well and they are in like Flynn.  The women go to bed laughing their socks off and spending all night gossiping like fiends with Boyet and trying anti wrinkle creams they got free in a magazine.  Everyone is happy apart from Mrs. Navarre senior, who has heartburn and indignation in equal measures.

 

Navarre wakes up feeling on top of the world.  Things are going brilliantly and he has conveniently forgotten what disasters befall him when he takes it into his head to make plans.  He decides to have a huge party to celebrate his success at being an all round love god and world leader extraordinaire.  He delegates the entertainment to Don Armado, Costard and all the peasants, which news has already given Berowne a nasty tic in his left eye.  Still, nothing to be done.

 

The night of the entertainment rolls inexorably on and all the guests gather together for a final shindig in which Navarre is convinced he will bag himself a royal wife and the others are hoping for a shag at least.

 

It all starts to go wrong when the ladies complain that their lovers are fickle, and too stupid to work out which is their own girlfriends.  It takes a couple of bottles of champagne and an hour of extensive grovelling to make peace.

 

Then the entertainment begins.  It is only as the curtain opens that Navarre realises what a total half wit he has been in letting these people put on a play.  It is too late. 

 

In the middle of the play, which make’s 4C’s modern rendition of the nativity play set in an asylum seeker’s camp look worthy of a Tony, it transpires that Jacquenetta is pregnant by Don Armado.  Costard is not best pleased and a duel looks set to take pride of place as the main entertainment of the evening instead.

 

Just as they are squaring up to each other, Mercade, a messenger arrives from the French court and drops the bombshell that the king of France is dead and that the princess needs to come home to be measured up into forty yards of black bombazine, and there’s no time to hang about.

 

Navarre cannot believe his bad luck.  Mrs Navarre senior is now doing a jig in the vol au vents and downing a swift victory gin.  He tries to persuade the princess that probably having your father die, especially when he’s a king, isn’t so bad really and can’t she just stay and marry him instead.  She is quite clear that the answer ‘yes’ is not an option.  He says he would settle for a knee trembler behind the bike sheds.  She won’t hear of it.

 

Eventually she softens and says that she will marry him on two conditions.  The first is that he send his mother to the Galapagos islands.  The second is that he goes to a hermitage and lives a life of holy contemplation for twelve months before he comes to find her.  If he still wants to marry her after that, she’ll have him. 

 

He agrees with alacrity.  On balance, considering that he was going to spend three years without having any sex, and now after one he might get lucky, he thinks it’s a fair trade off.  He agrees, as do all the other men except Berowne.

 

Rosaline’s demand in return for her hand is slightly more bizarre.  She says that she finds all this dressing up as a Cossack business quite troubling and wants him to get it out of his system.  She asks him to go out every day and find dying peasants and try to make them laugh.  If he succeeds and he still wants her, he can have her.

 

He is slightly baffled by this, as is everyone else.  However, there is no denying the fact that Rosaline is a babe and has a magnificent pair of bosoms.  He’s not going to argue too hard. He agrees and the ladies all float off to France to sit in a dark cupboard wailing for twelve months.  The men don their hair shirts, abandon Navarre to its fate and disappear to their respective hermitages and hospitals.

 

The final shot is Mrs. Navarre senior being tied to a deckchair on board the paddle steamer ‘Big Turtles’, bound for the Galapagos Islands.

 

Fin