Simon Ward reviews Love’s Labour’s Lost in Charterhouse Square, London EC1

There is something undeniably magical about seeing Shakespeare performed in the open air on a summer’s evening. We somehow feel that we are close to how the plays would orignally have been performed. From modest beginnings with just nine performances of Much Ado About Nothing back in 2016, Sue Fletcher and Martin Neild have been bringing the enchantment to life for ten years now, and with no signs of stopping. This year the company will be performing 35 times across 32 venues. Shakespeare in the Squares is now firmly established as part of the London summer scene. Bring a picnic, but be prepared for everything that the Great British Summer can throw at you.

If there is any trepidation about watching a lesser-known Shakespeare text, banish such thoughts at once. The trademark approach of this team is to make sure that the plays are accessible, intelligible and, most of all, fun. Director Toby Gordon has chosen to set the play in the late-sixties, allowing Emily Stuart to design beautiful period-appropriate costumes, and giving musical director Annemarie Lewis Thomas the chance to showcase some musical gems from that era. The energetic and multi-talented cast switch effortlessly between tight pop ensemble and verse-speaking thespians.

The play begins with Ferdinand (Nathan Musoki), King of Navarre, and his courtiers Berowne (Niall Ransome) and Dumain (Dexter Southern). With high-minded seriousness, Ferdinand has decided that, for the next three years, they must renounce the company of women in order to concentrate on their studies. More or less reluctantly the others agree. However the plan unravels almost at once, when the Princess of France (Laura Andresen Guimarães) arrives with important business to discuss. She is distinctly less than impressed to find that she, together with her entourage, Katharine (Flo Lunnon), Rosaline (Rhiannon Neads) and lawyer Boyet (Emma Manton), can only be received in the field a mile from the court in keeping with the men’s oath.

Meanwhile, and in contrast with the professed courtly abstinence of the courtiers, the regular country folk are busy falling in and out of love and lust with gay abandon. Visting flamboyant Spaniard Armado (Dexter Southern) denounces the tryst between Costard (John Holt-Roberts) and Jaquenetta (Flo Lunnon), but only because he has designs on her himself. The King, Princess, ladies and gentlemen all end up entangled together, of course, after much battling of wits and disguises that are all too easily seen through. There is, though, an abrupt tonal shift as the play concludes, when the preceding high jinks can be seen for what they are – a brief moment out of time before the serious work of statecraft begins. And in that serious work, the bonds now forged between two courts will be invaluable. When Ferdinand and Princess confess their true feelings, flamboyant wit replaced by utmost sincerity, it is all the more deeply moving precisely because of what has gone before.

This is the perfect way to spend a summer evening in London.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is playing in garden squares across London until Sunday 12th July. Full details can be found at shakespeareinthesquares.co.uk