LoveSick at Panoply Theatre Collective

For the last two weeks, Panoply Theatre Collective has been doing a one hour production of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Kew Gardens Park. Well, actually, they call it LoveSick, and bill it as an adaptation of LLL, but it seems like it’s entirely made up of text from the original play, so if they wanted, they could definitely just call it a production of LLL.

Whatever it’s called, though, LoveSick fits well into Panoply’s artistic mandate, which is “to challenge preconceptions of classical theatre”, because much of the play already satirizes snobby academics — so to do it snobbishly would entirely miss the point.

And they don’t. Instead, this is easy, unpretentious Shakespeare, and it feels like a true community event.

At the same time, though, it is Shakespeare, and the performers trust the language. Often, with contemporary adaptations like this, you get the sense that the production is working overtime to not be boring, but director Isabelle Ellis seems aware that playful, generous storytelling is inherently interesting; Lovesick never feels like it’s fighting uphill for our attention.

They also chose pretty interesting cuts, I thought. I don’t know the play well (I’ve only seen the video of the most recent Stratford production), but a one-hour Shakespeare risks being too plot heavy, and this didn’t feel that way at all. Instead, they left in a lot of the dense wordplay, and trusted us to get it.

It was an idyllic afternoon, and the Shakespeare made it better. Lots of fun.

Runs ‘til June 19. Co-produced with Bard in the Park.