As You Like It
the Schaubühne
The Observer

West Berlin seems to be a city in a continual stage of arts festival; rather as if, having lost its role of capital, it felt compelled to acquire a new one as West Germany’s purveyor of cultural hospitality. 

The Berlin Theatertreffen, a three-week event closing today, is itself an assertion of the German theatre’s identity: more particularly of the identity of its directors.

A jury have chosen 10 productions from Germany’s subsidized output over the previous year. Once they have come to Berlin (only two of this year’s offerings actually originated there), the critical function passes to the audience who are the most vocal connoisseurs I have encountered. A pretty way-out production of Goethe’s “Iphigenia in Tauris” was greeted with cheers and boos of equal volume. I assumed that the barrackers were greeted with cheers and boos of equal volume. I assumed that the barrackers were conservatives who objected to seeing Goethe staged on a setting suggestive of a bomb-site. A colleague, wiser than I in the ways of Berliners, told me that they were actually radicals who objected to seeing Goethe staged at all.

Of the two Berlin productions granted entrance to the festival, one, expectedly, was the work of Peter Stein. Surprisingly, however, it was not his celebrated version of As You Like It, though this show has probably made more noise in the world than any other German product since the decline of the Berliner Ensemble. It was, however, still on view and I took myself to it. Or rather was taken: the show is performed in an outlying film studio and a special bus is laid on from mid-town.

On arrival, you are ushered through a series of outhouses into the first playing space: a long white room, crannied and balustraded, where the audience stand huddled to watch the play’s pre-Arden scenes. If the intention is to make us feel like members of the court then it fails, but there is enough in the action itself to hold us. After 40 minutes the doors open and we are off to Arden. We walk for five minutes or more through a maze of passages, hung about with details from the Elizabethan World Picture, and emerge properly footsore and expectant into a mind-blowing Forest of Arden: a cross between Disneyland and the tree-walk in the Battersea Pleasure Gardens. This time we can sit down: just as well, since the entertainment lasts for three more uninterrupted hours. But then in Arden you lose track of time; there’s no clock in the forest.

The production has a tremendous primitive appeal; the studio set is a huge toy and we yearn sometimes for the actors to be turned off it so we can play there ourselves. But the treatment of the play itself is sophisticated and meticulous.

There is no uniformity to Stein’s greenwood; Audrey may be realistically churning butter in one corner of it, while Phoebe and Silvius are adopting conscious pastoral poses in another. This simultaneity (tentatively explored over here by Terry Hands and Pip Simmons) is an enormously valuable technique for staging Shakespeare. It allows us - like the best imagistic criticism - to see a play’s world whole. And Stein does it without sacrificing the narrative; indeed he enhances it, bringing off-stage events before our eyes, right down to the invasion of Arden by the usurper’s army. This might not work with the original text (Shakespeare’s rhythms put up their own defence against intrusion), but a translation can afford to be explanatory.

The production is steeped in Elizabethan lore: the only reason I can think of for its exclusion from the official festival cannon. Official opinion seems to prefer its classics dragged into the twentieth century, though preferably not kicking and screaming.