As You Like It
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

As You Like It (Stratford) presents us with the two faces of Trevor Nunn. The showbiz Nunn, late of the Comedy of Errors, turns as much of the show as possible into a musical. Likely bits of dialogue are sung—a bad idea, though an increasingly common one, since good dialogue is different in shape and pressure from a good lyric—and the real songs are tuned, care of Gillian Lynne, into production numbers. This is fine, and ‘A Lover and His Lass’ becomes a properly joyous prelude to the closing nuptials. It even accommodates, very touchingly, the courtship of Oliver and Celia, which Shakespeare, to say the least, underwrote. 

There is also the alert and scholarly Nunn, combing the text to amplify the story. Thus Orlando is allowed to practice his old wrestling on an old Adam and even on the disguised Rosalind. (It is some tribute to Peter McEnery that he makes such an arrant bully likeable.) The stream of refugees to Arden is unending; Le Beau and Charles, the wrestler, both turn up there, on the strength of some longing lines uttered in their courtier days, and Duke Frederick’s conversion (from sheer loneliness, I imagine) takes on a kind of logic.

‘Now go we in content,’ cried Celia, ‘to liberty and not to banishment.’ And Mr. Nunn carefully juxtaposes the two. (So of course does Mr. Bennett, who actually has a line about the Forest of Arden.) In winter Arden is palpably cold and Jacques seems the sanest man in the wood; come the spring, it rains coloured confetti, and his discomfiture—for in each of the comedies, someone has to get locked out—is inevitable. 

In Shakespeare’s own day, philosophy and musical comedy met in the masque, and this is Mr. Nunn’s solvent here, though he pushes it on a half century or more; cutout forest with crooks for the shepherds (Phebe, sleepless, looks like Bo-Beep), an etched country chateau for Oliver, and the court of Versailles for the Duke, with Touchstone, jumping on in time, got up like Watteau’s sad jester Gilles. 

Hymen, who comes on to marry everyone at the end, now has a sung prologue, president at a dispute between Fortune and Nature. Rosalind and Celia, two scenes on, carefully enunciate their brief discussion of these two abstractions, but it remains an intellectual accretion, and though marriage is the climax of the play, it is not really its subject. Besides, the songs, the dances, and the costumes do not as yet become many of the actors. 

If Nature means innate ability and Fortune acquired skills, Kate Nellington’s Rosalind is natural, able with her superb whole-heartedness to rule a scene, but not to govern this stage, this language, and this over-complicated presentation. She is at her finest in the mock marriage where her page-boy masquerade disappears; it is always the woman whom we watch and for whom we feel. Emrys James’s diseased Jacques similarly fails to ride the production. I likes him when he was on, but forgot him when he wasn’t. Best of the rest are Judith Paris’s Celia, Ian Gelder’s Silvius, and David Shaw-Parker’s unnervingly confident William.