Love’s Labour’s Lost review – paella, bullfighting and flamenco make Shakespeare’s farce a fiesta

Choreographer Carmen Igarza deserves to take a bow as spectacular dance and movement add passion to the seemingly unfinished play

The fact that Love’s Labour’s Lost is relatively unloved by Shakespeare producers and scholars is due to this mid-16th-century comedy being an early example of his dramatic craft – an RSC online timeline lists it ninth in the 38 main attributed plays – and an unusually inconclusive ending: the typical act five marry-go-round is suddenly deferred for a year.

These problems mean that even purists object less than usual to a solving directorial concept. Tom Littler, in alfresco stagings playing this summer in Guildford and Richmond, pairs the seemingly incomplete piece with Much Ado About Nothing (which some believe to be an otherwise lost Shakespeare piece called Love’s Labour’s Won), unifying the characters and plot lines.

Apart from also being outdoors, Indiana Lown-Collins’s revival for Shakespeare’s Globe is an equally but differently radical revision. Shakespeare has the Spanish kingdom of Navarre – where three young men have signed up to an early detox scheme, renouncing sex and food for meditation – visited by a princess of France and her retinue, who threaten their pledges.

In this version, everyone is Spanish – a translation helped, in the summer of 26, by there being as many fans flapping in the audience as in a high-season Madrid street cafe. On stage, adieu becomes adios with some other English words translated – a repast is specified to be paella – and the action punctuated and inflected by sequences of flamenco dance and song.

The hunting of a deer in the original here becomes a choreographed bullfight, spectacularly danced by Pablo Egea as the tauran prey. Dance and movement routines – the romantic longing and underlying violence of flamenco reasonably reflecting the themes of the play – regularly stop the show. The programme bills Carmen Igarza as choreographer and Vanessa Guevara as pre-hispanic movement consultant; however this duet worked, they deserve to take a bow at the end of each performance.

Less happily, substantial rewriting introduces the figure of Queen Elizabeth I to the masque staged amid the climactic anti-romantic interactions, including jokes about her sex life and vagina. Shakespeare’s play is filled with bawdy that this production always stands up: in the scene in which the three would-be abstinent men are disguised as Muscovites, they sport golden penile codpieces and nippled shoulder pads. However, had Shakespeare pricked his patron in the way this production adds, Love’s Labour’s Lost would have been his final play, the other 29 lost to us.

I would be concerned about students and tourists leaving the Globe admiring Shakespeare’s Elizabethan lèse-majesté, and such is the power of Littler’s double bill that Love’s Labour’s Lost played alone now feels even more half-hearted. But this production is, within its concept, generally a joy.

The cast is multi-national, sometimes within a single performer. The Swiss-British-Turkish-Italian Philip Arditti also inflects his cocky reluctant-abstinent Berowne with libidinous dons from culture, and spars nicely with Bea Segura’s sparky Rosaline. Another Spanish actor, Andro Crespo, is an unusually authentic Don Adriano de Armado, while also beautifully leading Michael McMahon and Adrián Solá’s setting of the final song, “When daisies pied and violets blue”. Alongside those responsible for movement and music, casting director Becky Paris should also win applause.

• At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 13 September