As You Like It
the Stratford festival
The Observer

Once there were modern-dress versions of Shakespeare. They were delightfully shocking, meticulously detailed (telephones always figured prominently) and only done occasionally, so as to jolt the audience out of their presumed complacency. They look, in photographs, extraordinarily dated. These days a new convention has taken hold. Pop has come among us, and, by introducing a style of clothing that is tied to no particular period, but thrives on jokey anachronism, it has made casual, timeless Shakespeare a possibility. Two Gentlemen of Verona was cast in this mould, both at its most recent Stratford appearance and in the current rock version; so was As You Like It, first with an all-male cast at the National Theatre, and now in a new production at Stratford.

The style only obtrudes itself where, logically, it should be most useful. A unisex costume for Rosalind would seem to be the perfect solution to the problem of her male disguise. In her tight-fitting jacket and jeans, she could just as easily be a boy as a girl. She could, however, just as easily be a girl as a boy and I have never felt less inclination to suspend my disbelief.

Eileen Atkins has a wary, fine-drawn talent, and there is one corner of Rosalind—the mordant satirist of romantic attitudes—of which she takes complete possession. But the undertow of erotic abandon is hardly there at all, and even the irony is muted. At moments, David Suchet’s vigorous, confident Orlando (an understudy performance, calling for no indulgence whatever) was running rings round her and, in this play, that is the wrong way round for rings to be run.

Miss Atkins delivers the epilogue splendidly (with houselights up as they should be), but the end of the play inevitably suffers at the moment from the ankle-injury which keeps her out of the final marriage-dance (as it nearly kept her out of the first night altogether). By this time, anyway, Buzz Goodbody’s direction has run out of steam. She clearly recognizes the importance of the marriage theme, but her methods of underlining it are tired. Grinning supers fling confetti into the house, and the audience gamely grins and wishes it would all go away.

These tactics spell an agreeable lightweight production which has little to say on the play’s main themes (court or country? – you choose), but makes good sense of individual scenes. The mod trappings are a great help to Brian Glover, puffing with professional pride as Charles the wrestler, and they work well, too, for Clement McCallin’s icily capricious Duke Frederick. When we reach the forest, it is a great comfort to find it in the charge of Tony Church, a pipe-smoking Banished Duke, mercifully unembarrassed by his own pronouncements. Particularly telling is his rebuke to the cynically moralizing Jaques: ‘For though thyself has been a libertine/ As sensual as the brutish sting itself…’

Who would have guessed that Shakespeare had Malcolm Muggeridge’s number so accurately?

In Richard Pasco’s hands, Jacques becomes almost the central character of the play—paradoxically, really, since he spends most of his time prowling its periphery, peering at the action with beady distaste through rimless glasses. The mere sight of the amorous Touchstone and Audrey sends a visible shudder through him. I sympathised; they are played grossly enough for me to contribute a few winces myself.