A Review of Love's Labor's Lost

Love’s Labor’s Lost is one of Shakespeare’s earlier plays, and was never among the most popular. The lack of popularity though had less to do with the quality of the work and more to do with the audience. Love’s Labor’s Lost is filled with wordplay that makes it harder to understand for a common theater-going audience. This play is meant to be performed for an educated audience. The blatant commentary on education can’t even be classified as an undertone.

BYU’s production of Love’s Labor’s Lost got the audience right. They performed for mostly a student and educated group of people. The only problem is that the vocabulary of the educated has changed since the late 1500s. So even though we strain to catch every word, we can’t understand everything, despite our desire to feel educated and cultured.

It’s unlikely, and with be unprofitable, to sit there with a dictionary to look up all the confusing words. BYU tried to get around this, with variable success, with body language and non-verbal noises. While the exact meaning of what the girls were saying to each other in the dressing room was unclear at times, the audience can figure out what’s being talked about when a bunch of girls are fluttering and giggling to each other. During the radiobroadcast, the banter was helped along by the applause signs and the facial expressions of the actors. We could tell it was a jab if the other character got a pouty face, and it must have been funny, so we laughed.