The Royal Shakespeare Company's project to stage all the plays over six years (the centrepiece of which will be the 400th anniversary, in 2016, of the playwright's death) continues with an energetic and good-natured production of what is probably his earliest work.
The two gentlemen are best buddies Valentine (Marcus) and Proteus (Arends), the latter of whom follows the former to Milan, where he soon forgets his love for Julia (Chanda) when he catches sight of Valentine's intended, Silvia (MacRae).
It is, as director Godwin remarks in an opening interviews, "a romcom about a man falling in love with his best friend's girlfriend" and it should go without saying that it doesn't compare with the masterpieces of later years.
It sometimes seems like a proving ground for his genius - the play is littered with lines that are rendered more gracefully in later plays - and it's interesting to see him try out words (such as "tarriance", meaning "delay") that he never uses again. (It is also, to my knowledge, the only play in which he casts an animal and Mossup, as Launce's dog Crab, turns in a performance of restraint and heart-rending pathos here.)
We see the bawdy crowd-pleasing innuendo that would become a trademark and he rehearses dramatic ideas and devices that he would later deploy freely and with much greater skill, notably having a woman (who would have been played by a young man) disguising herself as a man.
