Thomas’ College

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...