Bernard Levin once said of a production of this play in Regent's Park that it gave him a sense of ecstasy comparable in its intensity only to sexual pleasure.
Even if I've never actually had an orgasm watching the play, I share Levin's enthusiasm for this sublime comedy: one that combines youthful exuberance, dazzling wordplay and high-spirits shadowed by death. What's intriguing is the modern fashion for setting it on the eve of the first world war. Robin Phillips did that at Stratford Ontario (1978), Ian Judge for the RSC (1993) and Trevor Nunn at the National (2003). Christopher Luscombe's upcoming RSC production this winter is also being presented as part of a commemoration of the first world war.
Aside from Kenneth Branagh's laborious 1999 movie, tricked out with extracts from Hollywood musicals, I've always enjoyed the play and seen countless fine productions at the RSC, the National, the Open Air theatre and Toby Robertson's old Prospect company. But one production stands out above all others: John Barton's 1978 RSC version which set the play at the moment when summer melts into autumn, which pricked the bubble of intellectual arrogance and which had a dream cast. Just to mention the names of Michael Pennington, Jane Lapotaire, Michael Hordern, Richard Griffiths and David Suchet is to be whisked back to a golden age for Shakespearean acting.
• What are your favourite versions of Love's Labour's Lost? Let us know in the comments thread below
