SOURCE: Clapp, Susannah. “So, Farewell, Clever Trevor: Trevor Nunn Bows out of the National Theatre with a Martial Production of Love's Labour's Lost.” Observer (2 March 2003): 15.

In the following excerpted review, Clapp praises Trevor Nunn's 2003 National Theatre production of Love's Labour's Lost.

Trevor Nunn's production of Love's Labour's Lost is addressed to a country on the brink of war and a theatre in the throes of regime change. And Nunn has created an occasion to mark these endings, an evening flooded with sunlit nostalgia and fringed with darkness.

He bows out as artistic director of the National with a production that transplants the romantic action of Shakespeare's comedy, in which a band of would-be celibates succumbs to love, to a bosky Edwardian England. In John Gunter's majestic design, a huge tree is dappled with shade and layers of lacy leaves. There is birdsong and the buzz of insects; there...