by Mark Shenton

Trevor Nunn's final play at the National has a dark feel

After a short run of just over five years Trevor Nunn signs off as artistic director of the National with the company's first ever staging of Shakespeare's Love's Labour's Lost on the South Bank.

It is staged as a companion piece to his Olivier Award winning production of Cole Porter's 1930s Broadway musical Anything Goes, with which it shares many of its supporting cast.

But next to that sunny, funny end-of-term romantic romp, this play has an altogether darker hue beneath its romantic surface.

Nunn signals it immediately at the start of his production in an arresting opening scene that ignites the stage with gunshots and explosions and it is a war-torn montage that ends the staging, as well.

The idyll of the play's idle romances that take place in between is clearly there to be shattered, just as in the play it is when the news of the King of France's death disrupts the couplings that have been made in it.

Joseph Fiennes plays Berowne

As the world stands on the precipice of war once again, the contemporary resonance of this could not be signalled more clearly.

But it does seem somewhat imposed as a directorial concept, not felt as an organic development out of the play itself. If Nunn meant to go out with a bang, he need not have taken it quite so literally.

Elsewhere, however, Nunn's lavishly orchestrated and massively organised production - with a cast of 32 actors plus five children - is a frequently superb expression of ensemble theatre.

Now that the RSC seems to have abjured the company of London where they no longer have a permanent home, it falls to the National to stage this Shakespeare play.

It is about a group of men, led by the Prince of Navarre, who abjure the company of women - only to have their resolve immediately tested when the Princess of France and her Court arrive, and the King of course falls in love with the Princess, and his three courtiers with her ladies-in-waiting.

The cast includes Olivia Williams - seen in movies like Rushmore, The Sixth Sense and The Postman - as the Princess of France, and Joseph Fiennes as the King of Navarre's courtier Berowne.

A relatively early play in the Shakespearean cycle, thought to have been written no later than 1594, it prefaces A Midsummer Night's Dream with its story of lovers prevented from making their matches, and also a lengthy play-within-the-play device.

Dramatically sometimes clumsy and convoluted, Nunn and his designer John Gunter have given it some unity by setting it on a stage that is dominated by a giant tree and grass-covered stage.

Though the result seemed as if it might have been more at home at the outdoor Open Air Theatre in Regent's Park, it has been beautifully lit by David Hersey to illuminate different times of the day and night.

Nunn, meanwhile, may be leaving the National, but he won't be idle for long - in May, he turns up to re-open the Almeida by directing Natasha Richardson in Ibsen's The Lady from the Sea.