West End Review: Disney’s ‘Shakespeare in Love’

Can an adaptation be too faithful? Directed with verve by Declan Donnellan across, up and down Nick Ormerod’s versatile Elizabethan theater set, the 28-strong cast of this grand screen-to-stage adaptation of Shakespeare in Love (backed by Disney Theatrical and Sonia Friedman Prods.) fills the stage with high-spirited comedy. Authenticity begins to pall at the drawn-out climax of the too-lengthy second half, and doubts creep in that anything substantial has been added to the movie. But as Tom Bateman’s unquenchably dynamic Shakespeare reasserts himself, you realize that while the show is hardly newfangled, it’s a big-hearted hit. The script by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) doesn’t so much reimagine Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard’s screenplay (which won one of the movie’s seven Oscars) as compress and fillet it for the stage. But since many of the major characters have been retained, there are heaps of opportunities for cameo roles, all of which are taken with relish. Abigail McKern shines as the nurse and, fresh from his Tony-nommed turn as Maria in the Globe’s Twelfth Night, Paul Chahidi returns to the Elizabethan era to make a delightfully exasperated mountain out of the molehill that is Henslowe, the theater owner who badly needs Shakespeare to stop indulging himself with writer’s block and give him an audience-pleasing, coffer-filling comedy, preferably with a dog since Queen Elizabeth (gruffly imperious Anna Carteret) is partial to them.