Call It a Band Aid Solution

As you like it
the stratford festival
the national post

And so, for the second time, we go into the woods. The Stratford Festival's opening week concludes with As You Like It, in a good conventional staging with a couple of publicity points. One of these concerns the sound of the show. The other concerns its look. They go together.

As You Like It has a lot of songs. Stratford has commissioned new settings of them from Steven Page of Barenaked Ladies, and the Ladies en masse have laid down instrumental tracks to which the resident actors can sing along. There's something quixotic about commissioning a group primarily celebrated for its lyrics to provide music to someone else's words, but as things have turned out Shakespeare and Page sound like they might be a team with a future. The songs are agreeable light rock; the more sombre ones are especially effective -- or maybe it's just that they crop up in the best parts of Antoni Cimolino's production. When it comes to a lighter entry like ‘It Was a Lover and His Lass’, the show starts acting as if it would like to be an old- fashioned rock musical; which might be a feasible way of producing As You Like It, but would have to be done in more than fits and starts. The tune itself is nice, as are they all. If having a Barenaked Ladies credit in the program drags in some additional spectators (I think it might) then so much the better. Though if it's part of a larger scheme to tap a huge new Stratford audience, it can only be described, with acknowledgements to Bob Geldof, as a Band Aid solution.

Second point: The score is nostalgic, a '90s group creating a '60s pastiche. That's the period in which the production is set. There's a sense in which nearly all contemporary productions of Shakespeare are set in the '60s, but this may be the first since the hangover days of the early '70s to get so aggressive about it. The Pop clothes of the '60s were about mixing the old and the new, for fun, and this proved very useful for staging Shakespeare. The plays, freely and anachronistically written to begin with, could be rescued from the rigid tyranny of Elizabethan reconstruction and from the equally rigid tyranny of specific "modern dress." Most productions these days aim for timelessness.

This one, harking back to the time that invented timelessness, may be said to have a bit of both. It summons "the summer of love," though the summoning has been done more emphatically in the advertising than on the stage. Now, if you want to take this seriously, it's wrong. As You Like It has nothing to do with any kind of summer. Listen to those songs. The early ones are all about rough weather and winter winds; a late one celebrates springtime, the only pretty ringtime. That means love, all right, but it also means rebirth; and it's not unusual for productions to illustrate the progression by giving the Forest of Arden bare-branched trees before the intermission and green, leafy ones after. That's not an option with Santo Loquasto's set, which matches Barenaked Ladies with bare-naked ladders. Five of the stepped variety represent the forest, and they are not equipped for foliage.

I like the set, but Loquasto really scores with his costumes, which are eclectically specific. Rosalind and Celia, virtual orphans at the usurper's court, are in school uniforms for their first scene, nightgowns for their second; they are, chillingly, dragged from their beds to be banished. Wicked uncle Frederick (Stephen Russell, very tight-lipped) is a military dictator of Latin American provenance, who interrogates suspects by ducking them in a pool, one that's also available for merrier purposes in the forest, where love, peace and headbands rule. As for '6Os unisex: it should, in theory, be ideal for Rosalind's male disguise. In practice, it isn't; when girls could be boys anyway, the masquerade loses its point.

At one vital moment, the costuming mugs the script. "Alas the day," cries Shakespeare's Rosalind when she learns that her beloved Orlando is loose in the same wood, "what shall I do with my doublet and hose?" That's a line that soars and laughs. This Rosalind says "what shall I do with my clothes?" a line that stumbles and falls down. When a design concept clashes with the text, then obviously it's the concept that should go, not the line. In fact, both could stay. Audiences, especially audiences willing to take ladders for trees, aren't that literal-minded. The same mistake was made in last year's As You Like It in High Park, but we expect better of Stratford. Don't we?

A Hare Krishna wedding, topped off by a cheeky "just married" sign, doesn't quite measure up to the solemnities of the last scene. The fact is, the "summer of love" was dumb, a time of sappy sentiments and silly songs, and you're lucky to have missed it. The Beatles' ‘All You Need Is Love’ was a joke, possibly an intentional one. This was a period that got high on the word "love" without ever wondering what it meant. As You Like It glorifies it too, but it asks questions. Rosalind, the cleverest woman in Shakespeare, falls headlong in love and then debunks every romantic illusion and emerges still a lover. She's completely vulnerable and completely witty, which is why audiences down the ages have fallen in love with her.

Which brings me, reluctantly, to this production's greatest disappointment, which is Sara Topham's Rosalind. It's disappointing both in light of the actress' track record and of the initial impression she makes here, sitting at the tip of the stage and staring straight ahead, the picture of stark misery waiting to be aroused. But the awakening never comes. There is probably a vibrant performance of Rosalind going on inside her, and occasionally it breaks surface, but most of the time she simply fails to fill the space.

It's remarkable, with this central flaw, how much of the play still works, and works well. Ensemble scenes, in court or country, are intelligently directed and responsively played. Orlando's meeting with the banished Duke (Barry MacGregor, unabashedly decent) is beautifully layered, with Dan Chameroy leading the lords in the winter wind song, as cheerfully bitter as the weather it describes; William Needles, in lovely form as old Adam, reminding us that William Hutt isn't the only prized survivor of Stratford's first season; and, as a permanent outsider, Graham Abbey's eloquent Jaques, an embittered casualty of the sexual revolution. As Touchstone, Stephen Ouimette finds laughs in lines that most actors have left for dead, a feat that he manages by cleaving firmly to his role as a professional sophisticate desperate to maintain his superiority when cast among yokels. The more seriously this show takes itself, its text, and its actors, the better it is.