Simon Higlett’s set design is based on Charlecote House near Stratford, but especially in the first part of this diptych it looks and feels more like an Oxbridge college. As the young King of Navarre and his scholar-enthusiast friends vow to devote themselves to academe at the expense of worldly pleasures, the main gate bears the sign “NO WOMEN ALLOWED” – very much like Oxbridge in the Edwardian era in which Christopher Luscombe’s production seems to be set. Make no mistake, the young gentlemen are committed. But when a female delegation from the throne of France arrives, the chaps’ celibacy evaporates quicker than comedy-Spaniard courtier Don Armado can finish one of his involved sentences.
    
Love’s Labour’s Lost is a play more admired than liked. It contains scarcely a line which is not polished and patterned in a formal euphuistic style, and its verse is anything but blank with rhymes and metres all over the place. The irony is that its subject is the inadequacy of intellect in dealing with love; to a degree, it ends up demonstrating its own thesis.
    
Luscombe’s production is kept afloat, and indeed bobbing cheerily, by the casting of the central romantic couple. As Berowne, Edward Bennett once again follows in the RSC footsteps of David Tennant (Bennett was Tennant’s cover during that 2008 Hamlet), yet paradoxically emerges from his shadow. Bennett’s keynote is a bluff but keenly self-aware patrician Englishness, a sort of smarty-heartiness. As his beloved Rosaline, Michelle Terry is splendid as ever, with that knowing smile that melts your heart even as it scalpels your torso open.
    
This comedy lacks a happy ending, and even more so here: the men do not simply take their leave of the ladies for a period of contemplation, they appear in First World War military uniform, about to go off to the front. Suddenly the theme of the end of youthful self-assurance acquires a power that shakes you in your seat.
    
From the eve of WWI to its end: Love’s Labour’s Won is mentioned several times in contemporary writing about Shakespeare, but has never been firmly identified. The theory here is that it is Much Ado About Nothing, and Luscombe’s staging makes a plausible case. The house is now a war hospital, in one ward of which the returning officers are accommodated. The references to a previous attempted romance between Beatrice and Benedick seem to fit Rosaline and Berowne.
    
Everything about Bennett’s winning Berowne applies also to his Benedick, only in italics. As for Terry’s Beatrice, forget italics and bring out the banner type. She navigates the character’s acerbity, melancholy and romantic insecurity with a mastery far beyond her accustomed mere brilliance; this is a star-making performance. It is a little generous to consider the low-comic Watch scenes as illustrating the kind of communitarianism that the war cemented into British society, but nevertheless, this is one of the most successful speculative yokings-together of Shakespearean plays that I have ever seen.
     
Written for the Financial Times.