Love's Labour's Lost (More or Less) review – lads on tour in Ibiza swear off sex

The Guardian

05-03-2025

Standards have declined. When Shakespeare set his characters a challenge in his early comedy, he measured it out in years. In a bid to lead a life of contemplative study, the king of Navarre persuades his friends to join him in a three-year regime of abstemiousness, requiring them to renounce women and cut back on food and sleep.
Now, by contrast, playwrights Elizabeth Godber and Nick Lane have revisited the material but cut the pledge down. Their young men have to last a whole three days.
For a show opening at the start of Lent, that seems pretty feeble, although, to be fair, the context has also changed. Berowne (Thomas Cotran), Long-Dumain (Linford Johnson) and Ferdy (Timothy Adam Lucas) agree to avoid the company of women not just anywhere, but in Ibiza, the throbbing heart of 1990s hedonism. For every other party of lads flying out of Manchester airport, meeting women is the point.
Returning to the blueprint of 2023's The Comedy of Errors (More or Less), a jokey rehash of Shakespeare with a pop-song setting, the writers have reunited with director Paul Robinson to put Love's Labour's Lost in the decade of Blur, the Spice Girls and Pete Tong at Manumission.
This one is even less reverent than the last, not only substituting almost the entire script for modern-day urban poetry, but also beefing up the women's roles to make them equal partners with the men. Alice Imelda, Annie Kirkman, Alyce Liburd and Jo Patmore rise gutsily to the occasion. They are now on a mixed-up stag-and-hen weekend (with additional hired-assassin subplot), while a lovelorn Armado (David Kirkbride) is the Sun Park holiday resort's resident pill supplier.
So far so flippant, but is it irreverent enough? A truly modern comedy on this subject, apart from being an hour shorter, would have made more of the island's temptations. To be puritanical in Ibiza would take some doing. Resisting would be funny. But by clinging on to Shakespeare's plot, Godber and Lane minimise the men's dilemma. The comic stakes are too low.
Still, the audience delights in the old songs, dance routines and outrageous Cher costumes, not to mention the energetic silliness of it all.
At Shakespeare North Playhouse, Prescot, until 22 March, then at Stephen Joseph theatre, Scarborough, 27 March-19 April.