Branagh's labours lost. (Film).(Kenneth Branagh, Love's Labour's Lost in Australia)

THERE ARE MORE screens and fewer films shown on them theatrically in Australia now than at any time in the history of the medium. You'll notice I wrote "screens", not "movie houses". Growing up as I did in Willoughby in the 1950s I was a short tram ride from ten different theatres. Nowadays a multiplex can run over ten films simultaneously but it is screening the same kinds of films. In 1950s Sydney there were three movie houses specialising in Continental films, and scores of theatres in the city and suburbs showing revivals, not to mention the screenings by film societies.

Certainly with DVD and video we can now possess a cinematic work in ways that were not conceivable even thirty years ago. Still, this is not much use if you don't know what films are worth owning. For this the theatrical exhibition of movies remains vital and in Australia, with some honourable exceptions, we are encompassed by a terrible celluloid sameness.

These reflections were prompted by discovering on an overseas DVD Kenneth Branagh's latest Shakespearean film, Love's Labour's Lost. Even though it was completed in 1999 and released in 2000 to excellent reviews, the film has yet to find a major distributor here. This is no minor work by some obscure film-maker. Branagh is the most important director of Shakespearean films in the world. What is more, his mission has been to bring Shakespeare to ordinary people; young men and women like himself. As a boy, he was entranced by Derek Jacobi's first stage performance as Hamlet. It is now the stuff of theatrical and movie legend how eleven years later Branagh was to be directed by Jacobi in the same role and how, later the same year, he hired the great actor to play the chorus in his film version of Henry V.

As Branagh tells it, this mission began early:

 
   I have a very vivid memory of having been forced to read The Merchant of 
   Venice aloud at school. I was thirteen or fourteen and I might as well have 
   been reading the telephone directory, it made no sense at all, and then 
   another teacher made a connection with Romeo and Juliet. He asked "What is 
   it all about?" There was a stunned silence and he said, "Sex, it's all 
   about sex!" So to fourteen-year-olds with lots of hormones whizzing in 
   confusion around their systems, that was the beginning of a key. 

Later, when he was at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, a tour of The Merchant of Venice was organised for London high schools. Here Branagh encountered deep boredom and outright violence. "For the first time I confronted an audience who talked loudly all the way through and threw things." But he found "when their attention was engaged, it was exhilarating".

A few years later came the famous breach with the Royal Shakespeare Company. Not long after leaving RADA, Branagh had joined the RSC and had been cast as Laertes in Hamlet and then in the title role of Adrian Noble's production of Henry V--at twenty-three he was the youngest actor to tackle the part in living memory. Henry V was a great success; but Branagh became increasingly disillusioned with the working conditions at the RSC and the company's house style where designer and director collaborated in weaving elaborate metaphors around the Shakespearean text.