Having been drenched in critics’ superlatives for his Stratford Hamlet and having caused several stampedes of teenagers at the box office, David Tennant now takes on a riskier proposition by trying his hand at one of Shakespeare’s least rewarding comedies. What an anti-climax it proves! That a subdued Tennant makes a merely charming impression on Love’s Labour’s Lost is to be blamed on an uninspired production of broad brush-strokes by Gregory Doran, and the actor’s apparent reluctance to engage or identify strongly with his character.

Berowne is one of a youthful trio of lords in the King of Navarre’s aristocratic entourage who rashly agree to join the monarch in giving up the pursuit of women for three years. The men will spend the time playing at academic study. Tennant’s role offers dramatic-comical opportunities, but not many. It needs an actor with a flair for both the lyrical-romantic and practical-sardonic realism and I’m not sure that’s where Tennant’s gifts lie.

Equipped with an irrelevant Scottish accent and dressed in a fancy, blue doublet while the rest of the court is dressed in splendid Elizabethan cream, Tennant dominates by height, elegance and nonchalant aloofness. But he does not make that much of Berowne in love or of his wit. He shows no great talent for self-mockery and worldly cynicism once the king and his lords have broken their vows and respectively set their hearts on pursuing Mariah Gale’s oddly prim, joyless Princess of Paris and her three supporting ladies.

Love’s Labour’s Lost always throws down challenges for a director. It’s a comedy about language and understanding and yet is itself frequently hard to understand. The amusement springs from the way its characters speak — either to express themselves or to enjoy the sound of their own voices. Doran settles for a style of heavy-handed burlesque that went down well with the first night audience but not with me: the lords strike up ridiculous attitudes when disguised as bearded Muscovites to deceive their lovers. Similarly, Zoe Thorne turns Moth from bright, little boy into an exhibitionist girl.

Francis O’Connor’s non-realistic set with its mirrored floor and back-wall, as if to suggest how self-absorbed these characters are, is dominated by a huge gnarled tree: its branches decorated with triangular shapes on wires. A set of strange people wander through this fantasy world, the funniest of them being Oliver Ford Davies’s pedantic, desiccated schoolmaster, Holofernes, who regards words as meaningless things to be rolled and savoured on the tongue with a wine-taster’s pretentious relish. He smacks of realism. By contrast Joe Dixon’s Don Adriano de Armado, a Spanish knight with a wax moustache, purple costume and feathered hat strikes grand pantomimic attitudes.

The best productions infuse the play with a sense of love sought, fought for and passionately achieved in the high summer of youth before the shadows gather. It is not so here. Doran’s production makes Love’s Labour’s Lost into a hustle and bustle of stand-up comedians putting on a show.