Did I like As You Like It? I’ll be honest with you. I was disappointed. I should have liked it more and, to use a descriptor from my companion, it was ‘interesting’. Shakespeare’s Globe is a wonderful thing to behold and its playing space is wide and bare. There’s no place to hide. It can be a thrilling experience to see a great show there and I love it, but I think the key to my letdown with this production was largely, but not totally, down to the co-direction by Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine, assisted by Marley Rose-Liburd. Obviously I don’t know how the dynamics of this division in responsibility worked, but I felt there was no one at the helm of the metaphorical bridge of this theatrical ship, that is to say, no one who had a distinctive vision for the staging of the play.
This is not an easy play to stage. The text is plot-light. The instigating dramatic action, the banishment of Duke Senior from his court to the semi-mythological Forest of Arden by his usurping younger brother, and its consequences, including the banishment of his niece Rosalind, is drowned out by philosophical comment on nature versus nurture and musings about the nature of love. There are gender swaps, suggestions of same-sex love, and a rushed wrap-up. What there is of a plot is quite complex in its character relationships and this requires, especially for those unfamiliar with the play, clear and focused direction and clarity in the articulation of the text. In this production I felt that the direction adopted a scattergun approach with a sense of forced but inauthentic, audience-pleasing, bawdy jollity (such, in other productions at this House, can work, and has worked, wonderfully) and some of the company seemed to lack the ability to properly project their vocalisation of the words. I exempt Peter Bourke as Adam, the 80-year-old loyal servant to the de Boys family who warns Orlando of his brother Oliver’s plot to kill him, from this criticism. Likewise Jonnie Broadbent as Touchstone, the court jester who leaves the corrupt court of Duke Frederick to follow Rosalind and her cousin Celia into exile in the Forest of Arden. For reasons unclear, he spent most of the play, bizarrely, half naked.
Charlie Josephine, one of the directors, plays Orlando in a manner (and with a Thames Estuary accent) similar to Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses and, I’m sorry to say, lacked charm, but I eventually warmed to Lola Shalam as Rosalind, who improved considerably after the interval and was genuinely delightful in the final scenes. Molly Madigan was fun as Phoebe, the shepherdess who scorns the lovesick shepherd Silvius, but who then falls for Ganymede, who is actually Rosalind in disguise. Gracie Oddie-James also offers good value as a comedically flighty, sarcastic Celia, and in the Forest is dressed as a Little Bo Peep.
The other players were competent in characterisation but underpowered. The design by Paul Wills consists of a series of white canvases upstage upon which, during the course of the play, were sketched and painted, cartoon trees to represent the Forest. It did not work for me and I did not understand the purpose of this conceit. It tried to be cute and clever but left me unmoved. Similarly, Katie Richardson’s music (she also plays Hymen, who administers the matrimonial rites to the couplings in the finale), in which she led on vocals and guitar, was variable and, to my mind, did not always fit the song words, which, regrettably, were not particularly well sung by the performers. Costuming by Laura Hunt was, to start, colourfully caricaturish in the court scenes, but became very ordinary and bland once the characters entered the Forest.
All the World may be a Stage, but on this stage, this world was a disappointment. It was, indeed, ‘interesting’, but I really wish I had enjoyed it more.
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