Rehearsal Process as Critical Practice

John Barton’s most recent Love’s Labour’s Lost with the Royal Shakespeare Company opened in August 1978 to rousing, though not unanimous, critical acclaim. Intriguingly, almost without exception, enthusiastic as well as dissenting reviewers noted that what they saw and heard differed from their expectations of the play they thought they knew. Writing in the Sunday Times, John Peter went further, characterizing Barton’s performance text as “one of those productions which re-draw the map of a play.” ¹