In the spring of 2024, my English cohort were generously taken to see a new RSC production of Love’s Labour’s Lost in Stratford-upon-Avon. Wanting to know a bit more about the show beforehand, I did some research, and was promptly confronted with an image of several men in iridescent suits of armour. These figures seemed to be providing the audience with an amateur rendition of the Backstreet Boys’ ‘I Want It That Way’. When I was seated in the theatre a few days later, it became evident that this particularly florid detail formed part of the play’s central aesthetic. The setting was no longer Navarre, but a glossy members-only style spa by the seaside, complete with crisp white sports outfits and glowing surfaces.

Glimmeringly contemporary versions of Shakespeare aren’t a new phenomenon. Young Leonardo DiCaprio in a Hawaiian shirt and crucifix necklace, scrawling in a notebook to the sound of Radiohead’s ‘Talk Show Host,’ comes to mind. But film and theatre aren’t the same; on screen, every last detail can be finetuned to provide a sense of cohesiveness in adaptation. In Romeo + Juliet (1996), for example, Baz Luhrmann ensures that the guns pulled out in a Capulet vs Montague duel are named after weapons more appropriate to the Bard’s era (such as ‘dagger’ and ‘sword’). This cinematographic wink suggests that the filmmakers are determined to pay tribute to Shakespeare’s writing as much as possible, albeit subtly. The stage allows for no such attention to detail; every modernisation choice has to be bolder, stronger, and more garish for the sake of those watching. And hence, they really have to be the right choices to begin with.

“Every modernisation choice has to be bolder, stronger, and more garish”

While this Love’s Labour’s Lost production featured impressive performances, with the audience frequently in stitches, and a great deal of effort had clearly gone into the design, I came away from it feeling that the spa setting had acted as a giant luminous plaster slapped over the wound of a not entirely organised creative project. I found no fault with the acting, but I was distracted by the gimmicky qualities: the bellowed lines, the partial nudity, the acrobatics. It was almost as though those behind the endeavour were trying to get me to pay as little attention as possible to what was going on in the story; as though the whole mission were to dress it up to the point of being unrecognisable.

I remember feeling similarly about a different theatrical spin on classic literature, Jamie Lloyd’s colourless (yet busy) Cyrano de Bergerac. Not only did this version come up against the inevitable difficulty of translation, unlike the 1990 film, it also made the fatal error of maiming and mangling the original beauty of the play’s language. The heartrending lyricism was substituted for expletive vulgarity. James McAvoy’s delivery of a focused, erotically simmering monologue about desiring Roxane almost saved it, but not quite. Modern dress, settings and directorial choices can add to a stage revamp if properly considered, but editing the playwright’s initial language choices is a step too far. Not only is it arguably a form of retrospective censorship, it assumes that modern consumers, in all their callow excitement to heed Ezra Pound and ‘make it new,’ somehow know better than the posthumously immortalised artist. Lloyd’s lighting and costume choices, clearly intended to convey a ‘dark and brooding’ atmosphere, merely had the effect of muting everything. The take on Love’s Labour’s Lost did not noticeably tamper with Shakespeare’s lines, but the boyband interlude had much the same effect.

“I am not opposed, point-blank, to theatrical innovators trying to make centuries-old plays appear more attractive to a younger generation”

The 2024 adaptation of Othello performed at the Sam Wanamaker playhouse also transposed the play’s original script to a current-day setting, making Othello the head of a London police force rife with racial tensions. While I had some issues with this production as well – it was difficult to suspend disbelief whenever Desdemona was referred to as “Dezzie” – I also felt that it functioned better than Love’s Labour’s Lost. By taking a theme already inherent to Shakespeare’s work (racism and its consequences) and applying it to an updated formula, it still managed to avoid downplaying any of the original central concepts.

When done right, I am not opposed, point-blank, to theatrical innovators trying to make centuries-old plays appear more attractive to a younger generation. But a line must be drawn between cleverly highlighting shades of storytelling that were already there, and merely superimposing one’s own creative vanities onto another’s art. While the visual, sartorial, and sonic elements of these plays constitute an important part of their appeal, they should not, in their forthrightness, drown out the very core of the storytelling. A more logical route for some of these directors might instead be composing their own material, which would afford them creative free reign untrammelled by another playwright’s ghost.