Simon Godwin is not the first director to take the title of Shakespeare's awkward romance with a large pinch of salt. But there is something about this production that really gets you where it hurts. It concludes with the heroine Helena, a lonely figure, left hugging a tailor's dummy rather than the husband she has won, lost and won again, yet whose heart she can clearly never possess. The gap between desire and reality has seldom gaped so wide.
This sensitive, clear-eyed production renders Shakespeare's story as fresh as a daisy. In a week that has already seen Thea Sharrock's fine revival of Caryl Churchill's modern classic, Top Girls, in BAC's Studio 2, it is a reminder of the quantity of young directorial talent in this country. It also reminds us how badly we need a nurturing venue such as BAC and why it should be not just adequately funded (which it isn't), but munificently funded.
Godwin brings to the play the same simplicity and simmering energy that marked out Deborah Warner's early attempts at Shakespeare. If Gemma Fripp's dazzling white design sometimes works against real passion and the sense of autumnal despair that marks this play, it does at least give it a modern feel.
There appears to be some Cambridge cronyism at work in the casting and Godwin might have done better to throw his net wider for some roles. He surely could not have found anyone better than Rosanna Lowe as his Helena, however. Lowe is a potentially first-rate Shakespearean actress with an expressive face and the rare ability to make every line sound as if she has just thought of it and make perfect sense. But, for someone who has studied with mime and movement guru Jacques Lecoq, she is surprisingly physically constrained and hunched.
Neil Auster's Bertram is nicer than most, but never really explains whether his antipathy to Helena is based on snobbery, petulance, indifference or simple immaturity, while David Mitchell's Parolles is neither foolish enough nor dangerous enough to be either funny or totally convincing.
If this sounds like carping, it is only because this production is so close to being really special. Godwin will undoubtedly go far. But only if the lottery of our daft funding system gives him and deserving others the chance.
Until August 6. Box office: 020-7223 2223.
