SOURCE: Duguid, Lindsay. “No Kicks in a Plane.” Times Literary Supplement (7 April 2000): 34.

In the following review, Duguid considers Kenneth Branagh's 2000 film adaptation of Love's Labour's Lost.

Love's Labour's Lost has an odd stage history; hardly ever performed between 1609 and 1939, it came strongly back into fashion in the 1970s, when it was put on in a variety of settings and costumes. The play's incomplete state attracts some sort of updating, and Kenneth Branagh's idea of setting it in the late 1930s seems to offer the advantages of stylish and recognizable costumes and an atmosphere of vanished gaiety.

Having had the idea, Branagh runs away with it, introducing outmoded cinematic devices, such as Pathe-style coverage of events at the Court of Navarre, Ealing comedy chases and interpolated song-and-dance routines. The film is made up of many such allusions; Dull is a comic policeman, Costard a vaudeville trouper with a suitcase...