Water torture

Glass Eels / Love’s Labour’s Lost / Saint Joan

Squelchy trotters up in Hampstead. Nell Leyshon’s new play is set on a Somerset flood plain where a family of bumpkin farmers are coping with a suicide. Before the action commences Mum has done a Virginia Woolf in the nearby river and her premature submersion furnishes the play with its central motif. During the action, the stage gradually fills with water. OK, fills. What happens is that a super-slow trickle very nearly covers the actors’ ankles. It doesn’t help that this liquid is the pure and pristine variety piped in by Thames Water (see website for details) while the script refers constantly to festering, murky, algae-ridden bilge in which the eels of the title wriggle and gleam. This is a disappointing effort — lyrical, melodramatic and horribly dull. Let’s hope Leyshon’s loss of form is temporary.

Love’s Labour’s Lost is an exceedingly silly early play. Shakespeare the beginner assumed that having three pairs of lovers would give him three times as much romance. Instead it makes everything diffuse and repetitive, and the experiment seems more like a scripted gavotte than a drama. Dominic Dromgoole’s spirited, laugh-a-minute version occasionally turns into a complete send-up of itself. Three hours of sophisticated poppycock becomes hard work in the end. But hey, it’s the Globe — a critic-proof wonder — where nearly every show is packed to the thatch.

I hadn’t realised how tricky Saint Joan could be until I saw Marianne Elliott’s version. The opening sentence has been affected by climate change. ‘No eggs! No eggs!! Thousand thunders, man, what do you mean by no eggs?’ is cut to ‘No eggs! What do you mean by no eggs?’ Strange to castrate such a provocative and memorable phrase, and having stolen thunder from the text Elliott struggles to replace it with anything as impressive.