Love's Labour's Lost review - Shakespeare's Globe, London ★★★☆☆

“¡Olé!” - with matadors, flamenco dancers, cuatros, cante jondo from a cantaor, and a sweltering 30-something temperature, you would be forgiven for thinking Shakespeare’s Globe itself had relocated to España for Indiana Lown-Collins’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost.

With choreographer Carmen Igarza, movement consultant Vanessa Guevara, and composers Michael McMahon and Adrián Sola, she has created a joyous slice of Spain on the Southbank, drawing on her own roots in rural Alicante for inspiration, while elevating Shakespeare’s rarely performed early comedy.

The play is deservedly niche - much of the enjoyment on this hot night comes from the production and creative flourishes, rather than the Bard’s material, which, though bearing many of the hallmarks of his great later plays (he does get an awful lot out of the failures of a good postal system, doesn’t he), is relatively thin on plot, despite convoluted set-ups.

What narrative there is begins with the King of Navarre (Ned Costello) and three of his lords signing an oath of abstinance in favour of three years of study. No woman is to come within a mile of the court lest their tongue be cut out (very Sarah Kane). You already know where it’s going: the Princess of France (Norah Lopez Holden) arrives with her three ladies-in-waiting. Though forced to camp up on the edge of the mile radius, it’s not long before each quartet falls for the other.

Though there are only two professional flamenco dancers in the show, a dancing bootcamp has paid off for the rest of the company. Among the cast, Lopez Holden is excellent as the elegant yet playful princess, and her intense stylised bullfight is captivating as she condemns Pablo Egea’s fiercely sensual bull. Cantaor Carlos Lobo Cordón gives the production its emotional heart with his vocals.

Lown-Collins adds an extra dose of lustfulness to an already randy play: in her hands, these characters are horny. Katie Lias’s costume design makes that visually explicit when the men appear dressed as Muscovites, with well-padded codpieces attached to their traditional outfits. Yes, it’s ridiculous, but it owns it - love declarations come to the tune of Despacito and Livin’ La Vida Loca - even if it occasionally goes too far. That feels like a result of Lown-Collins trying to offset the text’s failures, but even with this, the second half labours and the play-within-a-play drags. Despite that, it’s hard not to get swept up in the fun, spending an evening imagining you might be under a Spanish sun.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is at the Globe Theatre, London, until 13 September 2026