SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE
The fashion for creating stage versions of popular films sometimes works but often fails. Confining the vast opportunities afforded by lavish sets, exotic locations and CGI to even the largest of platforms can be limiting and to take this popular box office hit to the tiny (but perfectly formed) stage at Brighton Little Theatre would seem to be ambitious if not foolhardy.
Not in the least, this transferral is nothing short of inspired!
Director Claire Lewis’s brilliant production surpasses the big screen original in almost every way, okay, those spectacular settings and extra filled scenes are gone, but when you put 23 able bodied actors onto the tiny stage of BLT that sense of grandeur is achieved. The script too in this stage version is also stripped of any extraneous nonsense and the whole is faster paced.
The company are on top form, well drilled with not a missed line or misplaced person to be seen and all this, the drama, is played out on a set of such apparent simplicity yet complexity is proof that the whole is a masterful work of theatrical genius. A few blocks and three curtained screens provide every space required to allow the story to shift from place to place and those few things have clearly been choreographed superbly. And on the subject of choreography, the dances and moments of physical theatre are beautifully realised and precisely performed and in that there is some very sharp sword play too.
Staying with music there is some fine Elizabethan scoring and live choral performance with one or two really stand out voices and moments where live performance morphs into recorded track seamlessly and in perfect pitch.
The simple setting with flickering candles and marbled pillars reminiscent of Shakespeare’s Globe also shows off the often lavish costumes to great effect, who did not burst into laughter at the appearance of that blue cap?
Enough then about the structure of the whole and on to the performances and with 23 players there are far too many to name all. But it would be wrong not to praise a few. Lewis Todhunter is marvellous as the eponymous hero, a flawed genius whose works are clearly here dependent on his association with Kit Marlowe, dashingly played by Michael Grant. Melissa Paris is delightful as Viola, the cross dressing heroine in a performance that I found far more convincing than that of a certain Hollywood star and as for the overblown Oscar larded moment afforded to a certain dame, brilliant in many ways yes, but equalled here by Nikki Dunsford as the imperious Queen Elizabeth I.
This delightful production is full of heart, comedy, romance and charm. It moves swiftly along, perhaps once or twice slowed by some rather odd and hard to explain physical theatre where members of the company mime writing on the screens, but other than that minor quibble I was totally delighted and fully entertained. So much so that I plan to go again when it transfers to the Brighton Open Air Theatre on the 17th 18th and 19th of August.
Andrew Kay
Brighton Little Theatre
8 August
Rating:
