Co-directed by Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine, the latter of whom also appears as an especially gormless Orlando, the production shifts styles and period specificity without ever losing focus on the need to ensnare an audience by any means possible \u2013 and if that means leading them in a \u201chey nonny no\u201d singalong or throwing in the odd ad lib along the way, so be it. (Katherine Pearce\u2019s commendably casual Jacques at one point remarks \u201cwe never met\u201d to one of the numerous lovers that make up the four couplings whose commingling ends the play.)<\/p>\n
The start suggests high-aristo hijinks, as if an elaborately wigged and costumed company are about to embark upon The Marriage of Figaro: another defining piece, come to think of it, about the cross-currents of love. But once the plot sends its characters into the Forest of Arden, their disguises the stuff of self-revelation, we come to inhabit altogether funkier, more free-wheeling climes that can accommodate both an 11th-hour appearance as Hymen by the wonderful singer-songwriter Katie Richardson and a gasp-inducing backflip from Jonnie Broadbent\u2019s show-devouring, as often as not barely clothed, Touchstone. Richardson, the play\u2019s composer, lends a folk-inflected larkiness to the ebullient climax.<\/p>\n
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No other Shakespeare comedy unites so many and disparate an assemblage of folks who to a person all see the light in time to share in love\u2019s plenitude. Whereas Much Ado contains a putative death and Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream seems suffused from the start with parental rage, As You Like It makes good on its title, delivering the audience into a pastoral idyll here visualised by a back wall of blank canvases that gets sketched in to stunning effect as the play continues: Arden\u2019s coming into bloom accords with the passions it enfolds, and the sparseness is surely of a piece with a \u201cforest\u201d that is in fact several times referred to as a \u201cdesert\u201d. (Paul Wills\u2019s design shimmers in its simplicity.)<\/p>\n
The shepherd Silvius pays obeisance to \u201cthe wounds that love\u2019s sharp arrows make\u201d, and As You Like It surpasses even Twelfth Night in making gender confusion a significant milestone in the sometimes pained courtship between Josephine\u2019s wide-eyed, gawky Orlando and the rabid, feisty Rosalind of Lola Shalam. A onetime Juliet at this address, Shalam may not be \u201cmore than common tall\u201d, as is indicated of Rosalind in the text. But that scarcely matters next to her Rottweiler-like determination, this duke\u2019s daughter barking commandments of love at all and sundry, at one point fainting at the possibility of snaring some of that love for herself.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve seen more wistful accounts of this play and certainly more moving ones, but it\u2019s hard not to get caught up in the pell-mell energy that can agreeably accommodate Phoebe Naughton\u2019s Audrey, a wench here born to work a room; Peter Bourke\u2019s infinitely touching (and well-spoken) old Adam; and Thomas Josling as an unusually likeable Oliver, Adam\u2019s master, whose behavioural about-face remains one of the most startling in all drama. (A shoutout, too, to the clarion-voiced Jordan Rhys as the late-arriving Jaques de Boys, an important stop on the story’s route from riven families to wholesale restoration.)<\/p>\n
In so deeply empathic a play, it\u2019s surprising that not more is made of the deeply platonic love on view between Rosalind and her beloved \u201ccoz\u201d Celia, who are jointly redefined as Ganymede and Aliena as the contortions of the plot work themselves out. You don\u2019t get much sense here of Gracie Oddie-James\u2019s comically inclined Celia feeling displaced by Rosalind\u2019s newfound affections elsewhere \u2013 Celia\u2019s plaintive \u201cand I\u2019ll sleep\u201d here doesn\u2019t count for much \u2013 but perhaps that, too, is of a piece with a production that has scant time for rest and wants instead to release the audience into a late-summer landscape of mischief and mirth.<\/p>\n