Cultural Dessert

We didn't manage to get gold-dust tickets to see David Tennant as Hamlet but we were organised enough to book (back in February!) to see him in the Royal Shakespeare Company's parallel production of 'Love's Labour's Lost'. So on Saturday we made our way through the Stratford Mop Fair, which had taken over the streets of Stratford-upon-Avon, to the Courtyard Theatre - the temporary home of the RSC while the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is being renovated. I hadn't seen 'Love's Labour's Lost' before: it's a relatively early Shakespeare and not the most complete of his plays. The plot is more or less over by the interval, leaving the second half to a series of set-piece dances and pageants. You can clearly see elements that will become 'As You Like It' and 'Much Ado About Nothing' (as well as a flavour of 'The Merry Wives of Windsor'). David Tennant was a great Benedick in BBC Radio 3's production of 'Much Ado About Nothing' a few years ago, so it it was fascinating to see him as Berowne - very much the prototype for Benedick. He was fantastic - an electric stage presence - very hard to take your eyes off him - and extremely funny. A very enjoyable production with a great cast - I particularly liked Mariah Gale as the Princess of France and Nina Sosanya as Rosaline and it was lovely to see a familiar face from the Northampton Royal Theatre, Natalie Walter, in her RSC debut season. But it was very much David Tennant's show.