In Stratford the company that Peter Hall created in 1961 is presenting a Love’s Labour’s Lost that comes complete with the ultra-fashionable but also mega-gifted David Tennant in the lead role of Berowne. And now, on the crescent stage of the Rose Theatre in Kingston upon Thames, here’s Sir Peter’s own production of the same piece. To quote a character in a later, more familiar play, comparisons are odorous; but, if I could see only one of the two, I’d hotfoot it to the RSC in Warwickshire rather than to Hall’s ad hoc company in southwest London.

Still, Sir Peter brings the Hallmarks we all value to Shakespeare’s story of the royal and/or noble youths whose vows of studious celibacy can’t survive the arrival of the Princess of France and her ladies. His revival is sparely staged, pacy and more lucid than one has the right to expect of so verbally elaborate a play. It’s also decently acted, though (odorous comparison again) only one performance, and that a supporting one, seems special.

Peter Bowles is Don Armado and comes across as the spiritual heir of a more famous don, Cervantes’s Quixote. God knows what he’s doing in the King of Navarre’s court. Maybe this Spanish Armado sailed north with the Spanish Armada and ended up defeated, lost and, like many of his comrades, settled in alien territory. Certainly, he exudes the forlorn hauteur of a man who has known better days and nursed great ambitions, only to find himself waylaid by emotions that he half-despises. Bowles’s vowels quiver and quaver, but seldom more than when he comes to admitting the “love” or “loouuev” that he feels for the dairymaid Jaquenetta.

But why does this outsider speak the same BBC English as everyone else but Costard, the bumptious peasant jokily played by Greg Haiste? If Bowles used a foreign accent his comic solecisms (the King allegedly dallying “with my excrement”) would make more sense and a reference to “men of peace” become the double entendre that Shakespeare surely wanted. Never mind. The spirits always lift when this dreamy grandee interrupts the main plot.

Nothing wrong with Dan Fredenburgh’s smug Navarre or Rachel Pickup’s sensible Princess or, indeed, their most vocal attendants. Finbar Lynch’s Berowne is very much the laid-back sophisticate. As his love object, Rosaline, Susie Trayling is the precursor of Beatrice in Much Ado, tart going on sadistic. But the great scene that ends with Berowne grabbing and ripping the letter that reveals him to be as much a traitor to his vows as the friends that he has been hypocritically reproaching? That’s much funnier in Stratford – and, even there, could be funnier still.

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