Love's Labours Lost is a play that's not performed very often and that should really have warned Branagh. LLL has a complicated and more than usually improbable plot, and Branagh has made a valiant effort to jazz it up by throwing out a lot of Shakespeare's dialogue and replacing it with songs by Gershwin, Kern and Porter. It's a clever idea, but it doesn't work. The songs bear little relation to what is supposed to be happening in what's left of the plot; and he seems to have rather missed the point that they're actually rather good songs and need good singers to put them across. Silverstone et al while decorative and energetic weren't able to put it across. Branagh has also updated the action to 1939 just before the outbreak of WW2, which gives the girls a chance to wear some pretty party frocks, but unfortunately makes a bit of a nonsense of the drama. Nice try. Ken; better luck next time.
Review of Love's Labour's Lost
