Comedy unhistorical and nostalgic
The sky is falling, and the best thing we can do is take care of our chickens. At least that’s what
An air of unreality pervades the play. The Roman costumes (the fever-dream spawn of designer Santi Obcena) are flamboyant and fervid in color. What pieces of furniture appear are indistinct black shapes with chalk-like outlines. The set design is at once extravagant and garish. Thanks to Jerry Respeto, who adapted the play from an English translation, the characters speak in hip, breezy Filipino and make frequent references to pop culture, as if they watched The Buzz all day. (Boy Abunda gets mentioned, for good measure.) In fact it was sometimes disconcerting to read the dialogue in stately English flashed above the stage while listening to the very Pinoy speech of the actors.
The producers add something more to this stew of alienating effects: gender blending. Several female characters are played by men, most notably Rea,
Prevented from immersing himself in the illusion on stage completely, the viewer can ponder the questions the play asks concerning power and how to deal with it. The play’s ethos is one cynical of heroism. In the play’s didactic third act (Respeto says in his translator’s notes that he did what he could to tone down the play’s moralizing), Romulus appears at his most vulnerable yet imperial, revealing to his wife his true reason for taking on the mantle of emperor. It seems the most awful job in the world, leading a state whose harrowing sum has become greater than all its human parts. The state devours its own people,
Not that the play forgets that it’s a comedy. Far from it. A festive — or rather, fiesta — spirit pervades most of it, especially its first half. The characters (“big, bold, and garish,” Legarda says in her notes) are a riot. The Minister of State is an asthmatic coward, sucking on his nebulizer as if it were a security blanket. The silly army commander Marte is barely understandable because of a serious speech impediment. The emperor’s surly attendants are improbably named Akilles and Piramo. The Teutons appear as refugees from Eighties glam rock. In this madhouse reigns
The performers are a crack crew of seasoned actors. In the title role is Dido dela Paz, who does an exemplary job veering from avuncular nuttiness to grumpy childishness to world-weariness. By turns pathetic and dignified, ridiculous and sad, Dela Paz makes lunacy seem the only sane choice you have when you know the empire dies tomorrow. When the lights go dark at the end of the acts, the backdrop of Coliseum arches, a reminder of the empire’s former splendor, looks like a catacomb.
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Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost is a confection of a play compared to his famous festive comedies, and it is a challenge to those who would stage it. First, it has the flimsiest of plots. The King of Spain gets his three loyal lords to swear an oath of abstinence for the sake of serious study, an oath challenged immediately by the arrival of the comely princess of
Director Bart Guingona and Repertory
Perhaps most problematic are Holofernes the pedantic schoolmaster and Nathaniel the pastor. It’s not clear why Holofernes, turned into a bespectacled professor, should sprinkle his speech with Latin so liberally, or why Nathaniel would be impressed by this show of superficial learning. And when their presentation of the Nine Worthies is reduced to a mere dance without any of the attendant humiliation, these inconsequential characters become downright expendable.
Also, the energy droops when the play lets the actors stand about hurling crisply uttered verses at each other. It doesn’t help that the script leaves puzzling archaic words such as “incony” and “imperator” untouched.
Happily, such moments are few, and for the most part the Bard finds a good home in the Eighties. When Berowne rhapsodizes on the inevitability of loving, the melody of The Psychedelic Furs’ Ghost in You tinkles in the background, and the play floats light as a fond memory. Whimsical song and dance numbers are added in which the lyrics of popular tunes are rewritten in faux Shakespearean English. (My favorite was the arrival of the four men in suits singing, to the tune of Spandau Ballet’s True — “Hark ’tis the sound of my soul.”) Actually, the play had me at hello, when the theme of the movie Bagets played before a single word was uttered.
The cast brings a youthful enthusiasm to their roles and masterful speech to the language. Niccolo Manahan, blessed with matinee-idol looks and a playful smirk, is the wit Berowne who falls for the saucy-tongued Rosaline, played with gamine charm by Cris Villonco. But when the clown is onstage he steals the scene; no one can match Jejie Esguerra’s earthy naughtiness as Costard.
Another oddity of this play is how it ends: not with marriage but with melancholy. Sad news from the outside world arrives, and the ladies must leave just as the wooing is successfully concluding. The long-faced men vow to be faithful while they are parted for a year.
But the disappointment is no surprise. Between scenes pictures have been flashing on the back wall, images of rallies and political turmoil, reminding us of a world beyond the school’s walls far less pleasant than this one. Its wistful ending is also a knowing one. Berowne says, ruefully, “This does not end like an old play.” It is as if Shakespeare knew his youth was ending and needed to move on to the writing that would constitute his greatness. Director Guingona shrewdly grafts onto this play the time of his own youth, and he sees, perhaps as Shakespeare did too, that beyond a certain point one’s innocence is, no matter the love or the labor, irretrievably lost.
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Romulus D’Grayt runs until the last weekend of October at the
