Director’s Diary: Loves Labour’s Lost — Building the World with a Soundtrack
For me, music is a shortcut to world building. It can capture tone, texture, and emotional stakes in ways that words alone often can’t. It helps me tap into atmosphere, relationships, and vibe. It’s also one of the fastest ways to start building a shared language with my collaborators.
A good playlist becomes a unifying thread that ties the world together before we’ve even entered the room.
Sometimes I’ll play a track to open rehearsal and drop us into the atmosphere. Sometimes we’ll use the music to find rhythm or gesture or help develop a movement vocabulary. It’s not about dancing to the music—it’s about letting the sound shape how we move through the world of the play.
The Sound of Love’s Labour’s Lost
For Love’s Labour’s Lost, two songs arrived almost instantly, like bookends:
“Poets” – The Tragically Hip
“Rivers and Roads” – The Head and the Heart
“Poets” is instantly recognizable—nostalgic, energetic, cheeky. It’s raw and clever, buzzing with bravado. It perfectly locates us and sets the tone for Team Navarre.
“Rivers and Roads” is the alternative to Shakespeare’s “banger” “The Owl and the Cuckoo” which ends the play. It’s a song about distance—about the ache of growing apart even when you mean to stay together. It’s at once melancholy and anthemic and has big sing along energy.
Other songs include:
“Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand, a classic party tune with swagger.
Jackie and Wilson” – Hozier, a sweet declaration of love with an R&B feel.
Mystical Magical” – Benson Boone, all candy floss, optimism, and falling in love.
The playlist isn’t static. It evolves with the show. Sometimes a song I added on a whim becomes essential. Other times, a track falls away once we’re in the room. That’s part of the magic. The music shifts as we discover more about the world we’re building.
Check out our full Spotify playlist to hear more of the music behind the world of Love’s Labour’s Lost:
Love’s Labour’s Lost – Playlist on Spotify
Next up: digging into the academic world of Navarre and why Memorial University’s campus is the perfect setting for this play.