AS YOU LIKE IT

AS YOU LIKE IT

TWAS Theatre at St Martin's Church, Colchester

30.09.2016

Old tyres, the obligatory traffic cone, discarded toys. Could be another part of Butterworth's Jerusalem.

But no, this is the French court, re-imagined as a community of Travellers, where Orlando is “rustically at home”. This bold transposition, though it sits uneasily with talk of noble birth, successfully suggests the passion and violence of the sibling rivalry, and evokes the exotic aristocracy of the Travellers.

Most of the play is set in the Forest of Arden, and this is delightfully transformed into a Folk Festival, allowing scope for the many songs [composer and MD Adam Abo-Henriksen] and for Jacques' open-mic stand-up Seven Ages, compellingly delivered by Thomas Edwards.

Shakespeare's text survives the transition very well, with excellent verse speaking across the company.

Roisin Keogh makes a superb Rosalind, setting off with a bed-roll for the Festival, sharing confidences with her friend Celia [Charlotte Luxford], dressing as Ganymede in baseball cap, bomber jacket and hosiery cod-piece. We can see in her open, honest face how deep she is in love; she has some lovely chemistry with her Orlando [ a youthful, assured Alec Clements] – taking his hand, offering her services, snatching a kiss.

Though we lose Touchstone and Audrey in the forest, there is inevitably some serious doubling. Most bizarrely Charles the red-masked wrestler and Phoebe the Proud Shepherdess, both memorably done by Benjamin Power. Phoebe, a vision in pink, certainly not for all markets, even steals the Epilogue from Rosalind. And milks her Adele moment in the best known number.

A little too long, perhaps, as are some of the other songs. Generally the pace is good, and the cuts bring this touring show in at under two hours, plus interval.

Just eight actors, which seems to be the magic minimum for most of Shakespeare. It's the number that Shakespeare's Globe tours with, and they could do worse than to borrow Tom Foster's lively, contemporary take on the pastoral – it would work wonderfully with a picnic in the open air.

THINGS TO COME – AS YOU LIKE IT

Coming soon to St Martin's Church – the setting last month for the Young Company's beautiful Romeo and Juliet – TWAS Theatre's new production of Shakespeare's sylvan comedy As You Like It.
It's set in the present day, in a travelling community, but still features a cross-dressing Rosalind, Charles the Wrestler, “All the World's a Stage” Jacques and the rest, plus live folk music.
It's playing in the Colchester church on September 29, 30 and 31, at 7:30.

Tickets just £10.

http://twastheatre.co.uk/venues-as-you-like-it-2016/

AS YOU LIKE IT

AS YOU LIKE IT

at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre

23.05.2015

Shakespeare's quirky romantic comedy poses more questions than it answers – hence the title, perhaps.

Blanche McIntyre's production is sumptuously dressed; there is no set – no forest, either – simply discreet banners to suggest a change of focus.

The stage is considerably extended, encouraging the actors to engage with the audience, and enabling Jaques and Touchstone to lob witty observations over the heads of the groundlings. They're both excellent, the philosophers: Daniel Crossley's Touchstone literally laid back with his cool shades, James Garnon mastering the space as the melancholy Jaques, giving a cynical Seven Ages with an apple in his hand. [Though not, like Michael Bryant back in 79 at the NT, munching it throughout.]

Some others seem underpowered – Orlando and the Dukes – but there is excellent comedy from the two shepherdesses [Gwyneth Keyworth's Phebe and Sophia Nomvete's Audrey] and from Patrick Driver as Corin, a very Shepherd's Bush rustic.

Michelle Terry as Rosalind and Ellie Piercy as Celia work together brilliantly as the cousins – Terry, a consummate Shakespearean for the 21^st century, is “a busy actor”, with unlimited physical energy, but knows the value of stillness, too - “my father was no traitor”. They are no mere spectators at the wrestling match, either …

The production seems a little long, at over three hours. It starts, like this season's King John, with a funeral, but includes plenty of fun along the way: anachronistic props – the tandem for the “two gypsies on a horse”, Martext's shopping trolley, Ganymede's map of Arden – and a great song and dance number for the Lover and His Lass.

And it ends, of course, with a lively jig, and Rosalind's epilogue, in which she reveals the boy beneath: “If I were a woman ...”

AS YOU LIKE IT

AS YOU LIKE IT

at the New Wolsey Theatre Ipswich

presented by Transport, co-produced with the New Wolsey Theatre and Les Théâtres de la Ville de Luxembourg and presented by house

10.10.13

for The Public Reviews

My fourth As You Like It this season; by far the most inventive, and in some ways the most magical.

For this anarchic adaptation, director Douglas Rintoul draws inspiration from his time at Calais's No Borders camp for migrants hoping to enter the UK. We hardly need reminding of the desperate lengths such fugitives will go to as they escape fighting, or famine, or seek their fortune.

One such is Fisayo Akinade's refugee, who tells us, prologue-like, of life in the camp, and of his love for Shakespeare, and this play especially. He is perfecting his English by memorising All The World's A Stage. He is reluctant to see As You Like It performed – it could never be as he imagined it – but agrees to continue if all nine migrants will take part …

Is it a measure of Shakespeare's genius, or Rintoul's, that so much of the play fits the circumstances so well ? Fleeing dictatorship, exile in Arden, Aliena's very name, liberty [not banishment]. These rough sleepers are brothers in exile; Orlando is welcome to their table, though he had thought all things savage there.

The style of the piece [designed by Hayley Grindle] heavily reinforces this unusual setting. A drab room, crammed with thin mattresses, peeling paper on the walls, an unseen helicopter circling overhead, shadowy figures lurking along corridors.

The music – the songs [was that Adele, was that Chris Barber?] are very effectively lip-synched, Colin Michael Carmichael an eager Touchstone – and the gloomy lighting gives an enchanting filmic quality to many of the scenes.

The actors reflect the disparate nature of the concept – this production opened in Luxembourg before crossing the channel – and the delivery of the lines was not always ideal. Nothing to do with the linguistic origins of the actor: the Celia of Anna Elijasz [from Poland] is one of the most successful, and she makes a lovely slut Audrey, too, getting what few laughs are going here. Michael Fox's Orlando lacks charisma, though, and Mark Jax, as Jaques, struggles to make his melancholy stand out from the sombre mood of the rest. Elisabet Johannesdottir [Iceland] makes a convincing Ganymede; her cross-dressed seduction is nicely done. And Akinade, as well as his introduction and a halting epilogue, gives us William and a lovely Warwickshire Silvius.

The grim setting leaches almost all the pastoral gaiety from this dark, deliberately-paced production [the "no woman" quartet a lively exception] which might have benefited from a leaner text. And I wonder what the [impeccably behaved] schoolchildren in the front row made of it all. Old hands will have Michael Bryant's apple-crunching Jaques to look back on, or this year's Rosalind on the lake. But I'm not sure I would like this haunting, thoughtful vision to be my first walk in the Forest of Arden ...

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews