Shakespeare in Love, review: ‘the best British comedy since One Man, Two Guvnors’

At a time when so many stage shows are based on films, it is odd that it has taken so long for Shakespeare in Love to arrive in the West End. But boy has it been worth the wait. The Oscar-laden movie, with its wonderfully witty script by Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, was terrific, but in Lee Hall’s delightful stage adaptation the piece seems to have found its true home. It’s funny, often genuinely moving and generates a glow you could warm your hands by. You can feel the audience getting behind the piece from the start, and by the end this inventive and touching comedy seems like a joyous celebration of the possibilities of theatre itself. It’s got the lot – a stirring love story, a prodigious succession of terrific jokes – and it sends up the theatre something rotten while simultaneously delighting in it. Before taking my seat in the stalls, I worried that the director Declan Donnellan and the designer Nick Ormerod might be too serious for the task in hand. Their Cheek by Jowl company, which specialises in serious classics, often in foreign languages, is much admired but not exactly famous for the number of laughs it generates. But they too seem to have fallen under the spell of the piece in which the young Shakespeare, suffering from a bad case of writer’s block, finds the inspiration to write Romeo and Juliet when he falls in love with Viola De Lesseps, the daughter of a wealthy merchant, little realising that she is leading a secret life of her own by disguising herself as a boy actor in his own acting company.