Page 10 - Fujifilm Exposure_9 Love's Labour's Lost_ok

SHAKESPEARE
SHAKESPEARE
Branagh goes back to the Bard with an all singing, all dancing Thirties’ twist in the tale
T hose gently wistful 16th Century lines (top right)
are from Shakespeare’s romantic comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. But what better cue could there possibly be, Kenneth
Branagh argues, for a suitably celes- tial sentiment conjured up by that 1930s standard, Cheek To Cheek.
“Heaven, I’m in heaven and my heart beats so that I can hardly speak...” Fred Astaire once purred lovingly to Ginger Rogers in Irving Berlin’s Top Hat, as if somehow completing the line first coined nearly four centuries earlier in Elizabethan England.
And with that, Branagh, alongside co-stars Natascha McElhone, Alicia Silverstone, Carmen Ejogo, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Lillard, Alessandro Nivola and Adrian Lester trips the light fantastic on a suitably dressed giant H stage at Shepperton. Inspired by cinema’s greatest ever hoofing duo, four young couples now prepare to face the music... and dance.
It’s a typically innovative moment dreamed up by the tireless producer-director-star for his latest cinematic assault on Shakespeare. After the mud ‘n’ blood of Henr y V, a rollicking Tuscan romp with Much Ado About Nothing and four hours of all-star first folio Hamlet in 70mm,
the 38-year-old British filmmaker has now turned his attention to one of the Bard’s least known plays.
Branagh explains: “I’ve always liked it a lot and especially enjoy the fact that not too many people are aware of it so it’s relatively little performed. A young man’s play, it’s remarkably uncynical about love, marriage and the male-female roman- tic war. One of the main themes is man’s lack of constancy, his inability to be faithful even to an idea for longer than about five minutes.
“On one level it’s very charming - pure boy-meets-girl. Then after this idyll of feverish romance, real life suddenly comes crashing in with news of a death. After that the play is surprisingly heartrending. It’s also a piece that invites a lot of slapstick comedy. It might appear to be as glib and casual as some of its characters seem. Yet, as usual with Shakespeare, there’s a darker and deeper purpose that provided for with some really beautiful language.” In other words, Branagh could have added, it’s got the lot.
The big question was how do you translate a rather obscure play set in an even obscurer Spanish neverland into a hot-and-happening movie for the late Nineties?
According to Branagh, the piece requires “a very strong directorial view. It needs to be set in a place where the idea of men giving up women, studying, trying to transform and enhance their lives by a conscious act of control can live easily.” For him, that period between the wars - “full of optimism yet still tinged with regret about what had occurred just a few years earlier” - seemed to fit the bill perfectly. “Shakespeare often plays very fast and loose with his settings. The play’s Navarre is an ancient region of Spain but inside it comes a very English sensibility.”
So the Navarre has become if not exactly like Oxford then at least, as the filmmakers would have it, “Oxfordian” in flavour.
“The play’s really all about the transforming power of love. The characters find that what they thought would transform their
Photos above: Kenneth Branagh as Henry V (Courtesy Movie Store Collection); right: dancing the night away in Love’s Labour’s Lost with Natascha McElhone
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