Trevor Nunn ends his six-year tenure of the National with Shakespeare's first comic masterpiece. But, while his production has occasional felicities and uses many of the cast of Anything Goes, it lacks that show's airborne lightness and smothers an already dense text in too much novelistic detail.
For a start, Nunn has needlessly restructured Shakespeare's play. The evening begins with gunfire, explosions and a uniformed Berowne caught in a first world war battle. He then proceeds to dream of the Edwardian amorous skirmishings and broken vows of academic seclusion he has left behind.
The point of this becomes clear at the climax, when we realise Berowne has taken Rosaline's injunction to "visit the speechless sick" into the fields of Flanders. But the framing device is gratuitous and even pre-empts one of the most magical moments in all Shakespeare: the entrance of Marcade, the messenger of death, into the final revels.
It is symptomatic, however, of a production over-stuffed with detail. John Gunter's setting is a seductive grass-covered forest glade, but this is the cue for an endlessly busy rustic soundtrack in which cuckoos sing, ravens croak and flies buzz. Yet the fussiness continues all through, with much textual transposition and even the beautifully simple climactic song of the owl and the cuckoo turned into a production number.
When Nunn actually trusts Shakespeare's play, the production is very good. The initial vow of academic hibernation is well done, with Simon Day's bossy King of Navarre swathing his followers in academic robes, and the oath's eventual dissolution - under the pressure of love - is as hilarious as ever, with Joseph Fiennes's aristocratic Berowne turning an apology for broken faith into a rousing call to amorous action.
There is much to enjoy. But what the production cries out for is severe editing so that the verbal fencing is swifter and sharper.
· Until March 18. Box office: 020-7452 3000
