"Love's Labour's Lost". Jesus College Shakespeare Project

After two years and six consecutive productions filled with war and gore, Jesus College’s project to perform all Shakespeare's plays in chronological order has finally moved into a new phase. This year is all about love and comedy, with A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, and, first of all, Love's Labour's Lost.

Traditionally, this play is neither the most popular nor the most accessible of Shakespeare's comedies. The central concept (a group of young noblemen foreswearing the distractions of the fairer sex to coop themselves up in a castle and devote their lives to study) seems bizarre and remote. The minor characters - schoolteachers spouting convoluted Latin, dim-witted but amiable constables, Spanish swordsmen whose braggadocio thinly conceals a rich seam of gay subtext - can be confusing and hard to relate to. And the idea of a bunch of irresistible women happening to turn up and besiege the castle with romance, while the reclusive scholars instantly fall madly in love with them, can seem contrived at best...

... Until, that is, you set the whole thing at Oxford University in 1974. Then it all makes perfect sense. I don't know what that says about Oxford, but it certainly makes for one of the most hilarious, moving and relevant versions of this play I have ever seen.

In 2024 Jesus College is celebrating 50 years since women were first admitted as undergraduates. It was a momentous year, and director Peter Sutton pays tribute to it with this timely and inventive interpretation.

So, that dull-witted constable becomes a compliant college porter, rendered with Oxonian restraint by Callum Beardmore. The over-intellectual schoolteacher, Holofernes (Tom Allen in show-stealingly brilliant form), is a curmudgeonly old member of the Senior Common Room, permanently begowned and mired in classical allusions. And Don Adriano, the Spaniard (an irrepressibly self-confident Lam Guanxiong), is played with all the joie de vivre of a bizarre visiting Junior Research Fellow from the University of Seville. The young noblemen are typical students, smoking, larking around, intending to write their essays but never actually getting round to it. Their all-male environment is just about any Oxford college in 1973.

And then the women arrive. Portrayed not as a Princess and her retinue, but as female students battering at the door of a male educational stronghold, and conquering it, they recreate the events of 1974 with hardly a textual tweak of the original script. It all fits perfectly. Lines like 'He is a marvellous good neighbour, faith, and a very good bowler' sound so appropriate for discussions about the First XI, it's hard to believe they're right there in the original (but they are*). And the occasional interpolated references to Uni Parks and rustication only make it more appealing.

Not only is this one of the most natural, fitting, modern adaptations of a Shakespeare play you could hope to see, it also isn't afraid to have fun, adding judiciously chosen songs and phrases whenever appropriate. Queen's Killer Queen is the leitmotif for the Princess of France (an assured and teasing Aria Chakravorty), and the musical intro from ABBA's Money Money Money stands in for the traditional Shakespearean trumpet fanfares. In fact there's so much ABBA in this show that, instead of dressing up as Russian acrobats in the final, insane act, the students disguise themselves as travelling Swedish musicians with unconvincing blonde wigs.

The servant Costard (here a kind of junior college scout played by the natural clown David Ingham) is like a Welsh Mr Bean, gazing mournfully at the audience or producing fantastically funny moments, seemingly out of nothing. His preference for ‘guerdon’ over ‘remuneration’ (both of which mean the same) is one of the standout moments of the evening.

But at the same time, this show can spin the mood on a sixpence. Love's Labour's Lost is famous for its ‘Mors ex Machina’ moment at the end, when a servant appears out of nowhere and announces that the Princess's father is dead. This evening a chill shivered through the audience at that point, like the first cold day of autumn, as the festivities came to a sudden end. It was like a student receiving bad news from home and having to leave in a hurry. No one knows what to say or where to look.

But in this production that moment is poignantly foreshadowed with a tiny scene in which one of the French women, Katherine (a beautifully understated Elouise Wills), reveals that the King of Navarre has previously been in love with her own sister. He dumped her, and she subsequently died in depression. ‘She might 'a' been a grandam ere she died’, says Katherine. It's only a moment, and she puts her happy face back on immediately afterwards. But the damage is done. The audience knows there's darkness beneath the frivolity, and from that point onwards the play's happy tone carries a secret pocket of pain. It's genius, and it is given perfect weight in this production.

The same is true of the play's irresistible lyricism. In Love's Labour's Lost, whenever a character speaks in verse, they do so in rhyming couplets, and this production catches that musicality with lightness and joy. The characters seem to be consciously using their rhymes to make fun of each other. They also frequently write poems and read them out, often with hilarious results. In fact this play is as much about writing verse as it is about feeling love. I guess, for Shakespeare, they were pretty much identical pursuits.

Could it have been even better? I guess so, but not by much. Comedy gorges on business, and some of the longer speeches in this very wordy play might have benefitted from a little more visual punctuation. But it's a matter of personal taste, no more. 

As if to underscore the arrival of women in Oxford colleges, the final line of the play, written as Don Adriano's, is given to Jaquenetta. She bears not just his child but, crucially in this vision, his tongue too: 'The words of Mercury are harsh after the songs of Apollo'. We are sent out into the night to the bittersweet sound of Mud's It'll be Lonely this Christmas. 

Shakespeare wrote two plays about student life, and we’ve been lucky enough to see them both performed at Oxford this year. The earlier, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, was just as brilliant as this latest Jesus College production. Shakespeare himself never went to university, but we do know that his godson (and possibly illegitimate child) William Davenport was at Oriel, and that Shakespeare himself stopped here on his journeys between Stratford and London. Did he look at the young men in their ivory towers and wonder what it would be like if women were allowed to study here too? I wouldn't put it past him. Maybe that was in his mind when he wrote this play. It only took 425 years for someone else to realise it.

* Shakespeare's only use of the word 'bowler'. Clearly not a cricket man.