Shakespeare's sonnets can be read in any number of ways: as literary exercise, autobiographical narrative or anatomy of love. Peter Brook clearly leans towards the last. In this mini-drama for two actors, Michael Pennington and Natasha Parry, he has arranged 31 of the sonnets into a four-part sequence in which central sections on separation and jealousy are bookended by meditations on time. The result is an elegantly fascinating study in the vagaries of human relationships.
It can be argued, as Stanley Wells does, that the illogicality and disorder of the sonnets as published is part of their point: that they reflect love's violent contrasts of mood. But Brook discovers in them a hidden play in which two people meet, part and are reunited. This leads to moments of wonderful circumstantial detail: Pennington, at one point, delivers a farewell note to Parry only to have it angrily returned on "Canst thou, O cruel, say I love thee not When I against myself with thee partake". Individual sonnets are even turned into colloquies so that, in 145, the female lover's imagined response of "I hate" are spoken aloud by her and, at the last, the two actors share their defiance of time, offering a genuine and very moving "marriage of true minds".
What strikes me about the show is that everything is just right. Brook has chosen as many sonnets as you can take at a single sitting. The poems themselves are acted, very powerfully, rather than simply recited. And the musical interludes, mostly by Couperin and performed by Franck Krawczyk, provide the necessary breathing spaces for performers and audience. Seen all too briefly in Kingston in celebration of the theatre's third birthday, this is a piece that deserves periodic revival.
