Two Shakespeare comedies, one world war, twenty years of Guildford Shakespeare Company and a great deal of government-surplus wool.

James Sheldon as Berowne, Chirag Benedict Lobo as Dumaine, Matt Pinches as Longaville and Owen Oakeshott as the Prince of Navarre in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Photo: Harry Elletson.

At Braboeuf Manor this summer, a magnificent old ruin played host to a company of thrusting young actors on the cusp of greatness.

But enough about me. Let’s talk about the production.

Braboeuf is a Grade II-listed manor house on the outskirts of Guildford, its oldest parts dating from around 1590. When we arrived, it was a deserted old pile with no running water, no electricity and a serious zombie-apocalypse vibe, surrounded by gardens, woodland and the kind of bushes that actors are required to enter briskly while pretending they haven’t just been stabbed in the ankle by something small, sharp and aggressively misaligned with blank verse.

Now the production has moved to Thomas’s College on Richmond Hill, a glorious mid-nineteenth-century attempt at Hogwarts. It opened in 1843 as the Wesleyan Theological College and later became the American International University in London, where rich American students could learn how to be English by absorbing it through the masonry. Last year it reopened as a British independent school, removing the need for the middleman.

Both venues are open air, placing us inside the oldest theatrical tradition there is.

The Trouble with Roofs

The Greeks put theatres into hillsides. The Romans added more architecture and crowd control. Medieval theatre occupied streets and public squares. Shakespeare’s Globe placed several thousand people beneath the open sky, with the cheapest standing in an uncovered yard and joyfully soiling themselves as one body beneath whatever the English climate chose to throw at them.

Theatre’s factory setting is outdoors.

At some point, some fool had the brilliantly bizarre idea of putting a roof over everything. History has failed to preserve the culprit’s name, perhaps through shame. The roof brought warmth, artificial light and the possibility of speaking quietly without being upstaged by a VERY LOUD SODDING BIRD. It also removed the world from the play.

Outdoors, actors and audience inhabit the same weather. The light changes around us. In Richmond, a fleet of parakeets mocks our verse-speaking with excruciating shrieks. Rain enters as an unsalaried member of the company (in theory, although this year it’s all about the bastard heat).

Bastards.

During the Guildford leg, every insect in Surrey enjoyed unrestricted access to the dressing rooms. Oh the dust, the pollen, the bits of God knows what. Seriously, the stuff that came out of my trousers every night could have built a small log cabin.

Britain has maintained a determined open-air tradition despite possessing perhaps the least cooperative climate in Europe. Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre and the Minack both emerged in 1932: one in London, the other carved into a Cornish cliff with the sea providing scenery that would bankrupt a commercial producer.

Guildford Shakespeare Company joined that tradition in 2006, when Sarah Gobran and Matt Pinches staged Much Ado About Nothing for ten sun-baked nights in Guildford Castle Gardens.

They began with a mad ambition, £1,000 supplied by Sarah, a few sponsors and no particular idea what a risk assessment was. Matt suggested Rhubarb & Custard or The Snooty Camel Theatre Company. Sarah suggested Guildford Shakespeare Company.

This may provide some indication of how the organisation has survived.

Twenty years later, GSC has staged work in castles, churches, quarries, gardens and, memorably, a Boeing 747. It also possesses topiary vastly superior to that of the RSC. I know of what I speak: I spend an entire scene in a bush, and it’s a cut above anything in Stratford.

Love, Labour and a World War

For this anniversary season, GSC has returned to Much Ado About Nothing, although it now forms the second movement of a much larger story.

Tom Littler has taken Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado, placed them on either side of the Second World War and joined their characters together. Ten actors play seventeen roles across five hours of Shakespeare. The young people who meet, flirt and fail to marry in 1939 return in 1945 carrying whatever the intervening years have done to them.

There is some scholarly encouragement for this. Love’s Labour’s Lost ends with its weddings abruptly postponed. A play called Love’s Labour’s Won appears in contemporary records and has disappeared, unless it survives under another title. It could even have been Much Ado. Nobody knows. Meanwhile, Beatrice and Benedick begin Much Ado nursing the wounds of a relationship Shakespeare never explains. Put the plays together and each supplies part of the other’s missing history.

Christopher Luscombe paired them for the RSC in 2014, but Tom’s decisive stroke is to make the people continuous. Berowne and Benedick are not two characters here: Benedick Berowne is the same man throughout (James Sheldon: titanic performance, questionable warm-up routine). Rosaline/Beatrice, Dumaine/Claudio and Katherine/Hero are treated in the same way. The young men who made absurd vows before the war reappear in uniform, having learnt considerably more about vows than they intended.

Everyone now has supercharged trajectories – but the strongest through-line probably belongs to Benedick Berowne. He mocks Navarre’s idiotic academy, falls hardest and gets nearly all the brilliant speeches, including one of the greatest in Shakespeare: Berowne’s spectacularly gorgeous encomium to love (an early statement of intent from someone who, in 1595, had just discovered his own superpower – & it’s clearly the same bloke who wrote the sonnets.) Six years later, Hero’s disgrace finally forces the wit to take a side: he chooses Beatrice and challenges Claudio. It’s the fullest journey of the evening.

Running alongside him is the fellow who invented the idiotic academy. I play the Prince of Navarre, who resurfaces after the war as Squadron Leader Navarre.

This offers one of those arcs actors hope will arrive before their knees finally give way. Navarre begins as a starry-eyed royal idealist (Prince Charles before he became King), talking to his plants, interfering in architectural decisions and devising well-intentioned schemes for everybody’s moral improvement.

His opening scheme requires four young men to renounce women for three years and devote themselves to study.

Then Sarah Gobran arrives in red, white and blue shoes.

Within minutes, the constitution is in ruins. Navarre and his boys leap into Russian disguise, perform an energetic courtship and lose several pints of actor inside costumes apparently constructed from blankets, carpet underlay and Space Shuttle insulation. (The production contains RAF uniforms, heavy fabrics, wigs and emergency costume changes. Open-air Shakespeare encourages the actor to rediscover theatre’s elemental origins while slowly poaching inside government-surplus wool.)

Chirag Benedict Lobo as Sir Nathaniel, Sally Cheng as Jaquenetta and Owen Oakeshott as Holofernes in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Photo: Harry Elletson.

Just as Navarre’s romantic idiocy acquires emotional weight, the Princess (SPOILERS) receives bad news. He has the opportunity to stop performing and comfort her. Then war intervenes, and he goes off to fight some Germans.

Still with me?

I also play Holofernes, a Latin-spouting stick-insect in a mortarboard, the local teacher whose backstory includes a nervous breakdown, a drink problem and a nervous tic since childhood that resolves every passing thought into a Latin conjugation. Suffice to say: Holofernes will be returning home with me after the job for a special new place in my wardrobe for future casting opportunities.

Meanwhile, back to the Prince: six years later, he returns from the war, having plainly been given the heave-ho by the Princess in a telegram, although they remain friends. He tries to engineer a marriage between his old pal Dumaine and the young Hero. The scheme is destroyed by little bastard brother Longaville, whose experience of war has turned him into a complete sod, as well as a bastard.

Men with Plans

There is something deeply Shakespearean about Navarre’s urge to arrange other people’s lives. Shakespeare has a weakness for men who mistake life for an exercise in stage management.

The Duke in Measure for Measure sets up a moral experiment in Viennese rectitude. It goes badly. Lear engineers his retirement by distributing his kingdom according to a public display of filial affection by his tricky offspring. Brutus believes political assassination can be conducted honourably and welcomed by a grateful republic. Men with plans. Almost as bad as men without them. Reality has a habit of turning up under-rehearsed and stinking of meths.

Navarre creates an academy designed to legislate desire out of existence. Desire responds by arriving in red, white and blue shoes.

You might think war would cure him. Instead, he returns as Squadron Leader and exchanges moral engineering for romantic engineering, confident that good intentions and princely authority can direct everybody towards a satisfactory curtain call.

Human beings, eh? Everywhere you look, tiresomely refusing to say the right lines when cast in someone else’s show. Just ask Tom Littler how that must feel.

The Prince begins with youthful faith in his ability to improve the future. Squadron Leader Navarre ends diminished: shaming a young woman in public, outmanoeuvred by his malign sibling and increasingly peripheral to the happiness of the younger characters.

The man who began with a plan finally runs out of blueprint, sitting on a playground swing, gazing at the audience, wondering if things might have been different if he’d simply been able to dance like an actor trained at one of the great British drama schools.

What’s not to love about that character arc, eh?

Twenty Years in the Shrubbery

Tom’s own journey forms part of the GSC story. He directed here long before becoming Artistic Director of the Orange Tree, including an earlier Love’s Labour’s Lost and Hamlet with Freddie Fox. This anniversary co-production brings the relationship full circle, combining GSC’s experience of site-responsive Shakespeare with the Orange Tree’s home in Richmond.

GSC has also quietly functioned as a nursery for directors. Natasha Rickman worked here as an actor and director before taking over the Mercury Theatre. Joanna Read directed two early productions and went on to lead the Yvonne Arnaud. Lotte Wakeham directed me as Oberon—a silver-booted rock’n’roll fairy—in A Midsummer Night’s Dream before becoming Artistic Director of the Octagon in Bolton; the two companies later reunited for an online revival. Charlotte Conquest moved into television; Abigail Pickard Price became an associate director at the Watermill; Indiana Lown-Collins progressed through GSC before winning the JMK Award and working at the Globe and Orange Tree.

The nursery operates through the work: Shakespeare and classic stories, small companies, strange buildings and theatrical problems that must be solved without waiting for a large institution to dispatch somebody from the appropriate department. Actors learn to hold an audience while aircraft pass overhead. Directors discover that nature has its own lighting design. People generally get fit over the summer.

Matt and Sarah built all this from very little. Twenty years of independent theatre is a formidable achievement. Companies appear all the time, sustained by enthusiasm, unpaid labour and a photograph of intense young people staring into the middle distance. Many vanish when the founders discover that producing theatre involves considerably more spreadsheets than theatre.

GSC abides. It found an audience, built an artistic family and became part of the theatrical ecosystem while retaining something of its original unruly energy.

Its buildings are borrowed. Its actors fight the weather. Each production must make a temporary world and persuade an audience to enter it before the rain does.

Actors, audience, fading light and whatever the sky decides to do with us: the original arrangement still gets first crack.

By the end, Benedick and Beatrice have fought their way through wit, self-protection and six lost years towards some kind of future. Squadron Leader Navarre sits on his swing while the younger characters move towards theirs. Around him are two plays, a war, several failed romances and twenty years of a theatre company that began with Sarah’s £1,000.

Mad ambition turned out to be a surprisingly durable building material.

The topiary helped, of course.

God loves a bush.