Love’s Labour’s Lost
2017: Barry Avrich

This is the entry from the Canadian Stratford festival. Like the rest of this series, it is a filmed stage production, rather than a more cinematic treatment, but the filmed version is directed with a very sure hand by Barry Avrich, and it is exceedingly watchable. (It’s also of recent enough technology that it will play well on a 4K system). Of all the versions I have seen, it is arguably the straightest or plainest — unencumbered with arch permutations or self-indulgent cleverness — and also cut less than most of the others. As such I think it becomes one of the best renditions of the play one can watch, if not the best.

The players are all rock-solid in their roles (as those who have played things on stage often are); none of them leaps out as a virtuoso performance, but that may be for the best, since the overall movement is toward an ensemble presentation. It is not a play with singular star roles as such; it does call for actors who can handle the florid and rapid language of Shakespeare at his most ornate and gorgeous. If a student has the time to do so, I would recommend watching this together with the Globe production and the older BBC version.

This is apparently available on DVD in Canada, but I cannot get it in the U.S. It is available on Amazon Prime streaming.

Buy or rent the play on Amazon Prime (streaming).