SOURCE: A review of Love's Labour's Lost, in Times Literary Supplement, No. 5052, January 28, 2000, p. 20.

In the following review, Morse comments on a Parisian production of Love's Labour's Lost directed by Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota, characterizing the production as a successful black comedy.

Emmanuel Demarcy-Mota's singular Love's Labour's Lost is sold out—and it is not hard to see why. His black comedy, in which the women have the better of it from the start by puncturing the young men's utopian fantasy, offers a rite of initiation into the brutalities of desire, and the accompanying shame of honour betrayed. As both Biron (Benjamin Egner) and the young Princess of France (Marie-Armelle Deguy) point out, the King of Navarre (Gerald Maillet) is on a hiding to nothing. The absence of cakes, ale and female company is a road not to virtue but to deceit. They may be swearing to devote themselves to...