Summertime Shakespeare

Rachel Kavanaugh's directorial touch is traditional, limp and shallow in this early Shakespearian comedy, which deals with the making of the perfect gentleman and puts the male quest for love and the classical ideal of true friendship in conflict.

Miss Kavanaugh has mysteriously set the comedy in the Regency period and designer Paul Farnsworth's ugly, vacuous set clutters the stage with long poles, on each of which doll-like, little houses are stuck. Perhaps the idea is to emphasise the extent to which the plot is guided by sentiments and ideals which strike us as artificial or outmoded.

In Kavanaugh's production, the play's climatic moment, when Valentine rescues his beloved Silvia, from being raped by his untrue friend Proteus, generates no rage or sense of betrayal. Nicholas Burns's stiff, wooden Valentine instantly forgives Nick Fletcher's villainous, under-characterised Proteus and in courtly fashion makes him the altruistic offer of Silvia, as if he were giving away an old suit to Oxfam.

American critic Harold Bloom in his recent book on Shakespeare convincingly argues the relationship between the two men is the play's vital factor and suggests by playing Valentine as that rare commodity, "a repressed bi-sexual", sense can be made of his forgiving behaviour.

But Kavanaugh's jolly, not very amusing, production, is simply played for broad laughs. It refuses to consider the gentlemen's ambiguous relationship or the suspicious attention Proteus gives to his own amour, Phillipa Peak's bland Julia, when disguised as a youth to keep a disenchanted eye on him.

Issy Van Randwyck's Silvia, looking almost old enough to play Valentine's mother, fixes her teeth in a near-permanent smile of ingratiation and oozes coy, winsomeness as she trips and simpers grotesquely around like a teenager on acid. Comic bull's-eyes are scored by two servants, John Hodgkinson's flummoxed Speed and Ian Talbot's terrific Launce, all lugubriously camp and petulant. But it is Crabbe, Launce's gloomy, bedraggled old dog who raises loudest the laughter and steals the show.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona