There're worse ways to spend a summer afternoon than drinking something cold beneath the trees at Thomas' College, Richmond, while watching a succession of Shakespeare’s characters flirt, bicker and generally make a mess of love. But Tom Littler's brace of shows – a co-production between the Orange Tree Theatre and Guildford Shakespeare Company – have more ambitious designs than pairing two crowd-pleasing romantic comedies.
Although it’s fine to just watch one of them, Littler stitches Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing into one continuous romantic saga spanning the years around the Second World War. Characters cross from one play into the next, identities merge, and events in the first become emotional backstory for the second – a neat solution to Much Ado's insinuated backstory and Love's Labour's Lost's abrupt ending. Littler smooths the join between the two so seamlessly it's nearly impossible to spot. Into this he threads contemporary asides and crowd work, which land as some of the evening's biggest laughs.
Love's Labour's Lost begins in summer 1939. The Prince of Navarre (Owen Oakeshott) and his scholarly mates have sworn off women for study and self-improvement, a resolve that lasts about five minutes past the arrival of the Princess of France, Leonata (Sarah Gobran), and her attendants. Their rhetoric grows increasingly ridiculous while the women watch on, considerably less impressed than the men would like. Sarah Gobran's Leonata and Phoebe Pryce's Beatrice are particularly good at puncturing male intellectual vanity; James Sheldon plays Benedick with charm and just the right amount of foolishness.
Neil Irish's set – florals, a bar, a wooden swing – is sparse but functional, leaning hard on the college's grounds to do the rest of the work. It's charmingly English – Matt Pinches's stiff, self-important Constable Dogberry a nice touch – if occasionally too twee, particularly when the cast break into song.
Much Ado About Nothing picks the same crew up post-war, the set now toppled and unkempt. As evening falls, the lighting turns the mood far more atmospheric and intimate, and the play is immediately darker, faster-paced and boozier.
The ten-strong cast play 17 roles between them; the core characters carry over, though Longaville effectively assumes Don John's role, plotting against Claudio and Hero. It gives Shakespeare's comedy something it normally lacks – a history between the people now trying to destroy one another.
The cast feel more comfortable here. Chirag Benedict Lobo, overplayed as Sir Nathaniel in the first half, is far more compelling as Claudio, and slapstick – Benedick and Beatrice hiding while eavesdropping – gives the second half a dynamism the first lacks. And Sheldon and Pryce, whose chemistry felt slightly muted in the first half, more than make up for it here.
Some passages in Love's Labour's Lost feel static, undercut by flat daylight and thin sound design that leave nowhere to hide; the first half consequently runs a little long and thin beside the better-loved Much Ado's richer atmosphere. But Littler has found a real case for pairing these plays: both are fascinated by ego, self-deception and the ways language protects us from intimacy. Split across a world war, that preoccupation gains an ache. The theory Much Ado was really Shakespeare's lost sequel to Love’s Labour’s Lost is a pretty doubtful one. But on a summer afternoon in Richmond, it makes a convincing case for it.
