Love's Labour's Won

Love's Labour's Won

By William Shakespeare 

UK, 2011, 155 min.
Royal Shakespeare Company
Director: Christopher Luscombe
Composer: Claire van Kampen
Starring: Edward Bennett, John Hodgkinson, David Horovitch, Tunji Kasim, Emma Manton, Flora Spencer-Longhurst, Michelle Terry, Harry Waller Thomas Wheatley.

Autumn 1918. A group of soldiers return from the trenches. The world-weary Benedick and his friend Claudio find themselves reacquainted with Beatrice and Hero. As memories of conflict give way to a life of parties and masked balls, Claudio and Hero fall madly, deeply in love, while Benedick and Beatrice reignite their own altogether more combative courtship.

Shakespeare's comic romance plays out amidst the brittle high spirits of a post-war house party, as youthful passions run riot, lovers are deceived and happiness is threatened – before peace ultimately wins out.

Christopher Luscombe directs the second of Shakespeare's matching pair of comedies that rejoice in our capacity to find love in the most unlikely places. Better known as Much Ado About Nothing, the play is performed under the title Love's Labour's Won, a name possibly attributed to it during Shakespeare's lifetime.