Love's Labor Lost

Tuesday I went and saw a BYU student reproduction of Shakespeare's play Love's Labor Lost.  I've been reading the play with my Shakespeare class and so the original play was fresh in my mind.  I soon realized that the BYU version would not be exactly like Shakespeare's version.  The most notable difference was the era that the play was set in.  The director had adapted the plot of Love's Labor Lost for a World War II era military base as well as a night club next to the base.  I was obviously curious to discover the purpose for this change and by looking in the program I quickly discovered that the director had made the change in honor of her grandparents that had met during the war and reminded her of Biron and Rosaline.  I thought this was an interesting change and gave the play new meaning for me.  The only problem with this is that they tried to retain the Shakespearean language which in a 20th century setting I found to be pretty distracting.  I don't think it was just the language however.  The director also attempted to create the 1940's feel by including some terminology from what I assumed was war era Britain.  This combined with some of the Shakespearean language that she chose to retain caused further confusion.

One thing that I thought was very interesting was that at the beginning of the play the characters left the stage and interacted with the students.  I know that in Elizabethan era plays this type of interaction was quite common but nowadays it is not as much and I had never been to a play with that.  Unfortunately this did not last.  Costard said a prayer and then the play really began and there was no longer the interaction that I thought there would be.

I wanted to say one more thing about the costume and also set design.  I thought they were both fantastic.  The officer's uniforms were very convincing and the ladies looked excellent.  As for the set, I thought it was very well done.  By rigging everything up with ropes on stage they were able to make very smooth scene transitions.  In addition to this they also made the set very functional for a variety of situations so that they didn't have to rearrange too much as the play went on.