As You Like It
The National Theatre
The Observer

John Dexter’s production of As You Like It (Olivier) is the best Shakespeare offered by the National Theatre since Peter Hall’s initial version of The Tempest. 

Like that production it is likely to be undervalued because it takes its material not only seriously, but literally. It is alive to all the values inherent in the text, many of them unfashionable. To take one small example: when the old servant Adam decides to follow his young master Orlando to the forest, he commits his welfare to ‘he that doth the ravens feed.’ This is the only production I have seen in which this profession of religious faith has been given any weight by the actor (in this case that marvellous National survivor Harry Lomax, repeating a role he played for this company at the Old Vic) and in which it has had any visible effect on the listening Orlando. 

There are two dangers besetting any production that underlines its references as conscientiously as this one does, and neither is altogether avoided here. One is that an accumulation of detail will slow the pace; the show could profitably lose a quarter of an hour without cutting a line. The other is that idea (and As You Like It is pre-eminently a play of ideas) may pass through the actors’ mouths and even through their minds without entering the characters’ blood-stream. 

Nicholas Selby as the usurping duke makes an attempt—unique in my remembrance—to convert love for his daughter as well as hatred for his niece; he even changes gear in one of his tyrannical outbursts to get the point across. One felt, though, that a director’s point had been made rather than that a character had been brought to life. 

All right, this is a cerebral production; even when it attempts to turn itself into a fertility-rite it plaits its garlands (eventually to be hung around a phallic maypole of sprouting shrub) with excessive determination. Similarly, in counterpointing the construction of the court against the comparative freedom of the forest, it sacrifices some of the light and shade to be found in the former. Rosalind and Celia are attired in the vast hooped skirts and look like effigies. Le Beau, who can be a pleasant enough time-server, becomes both the embodiment of corruption and the messenger of doom. But at least there is thoughtfulness here, and an awareness of the play’s grand design. 

There is, talking of design, a pleasing contrast between Peter J. Hall’s gorgeous Elizabethan costumes (‘the pompous court’) and the bare timbers—apparently taken over wholesale from this year’s production of A Fair Quarrel—that comprise Hayden Griffin's most satisfying scaffold of a set: another kind of Elizabethanism and one that makes an excellent springboard for the play in general and the ‘all the world’s a stage’ speech in particular. As delivered by Michael Byrant, this has cheek as well as cankered wit. In the second half of the play springtime takes over, the stage blossoms, and so does the play. 

No Rosalind can ever have looked more dashing than Sara Kestelman, and when she compares her love to the Bay of Portugal she manages some brilliantly searching modulations from passionate abandon to self-wounding wit and back again. All Rosalind is there in a dozen lines. In the central scenes of the picking of Orlando the wit is there in plenty, but the undertow is missing. 

Simon Callow as Orlando is caught in an interesting double-bind; he has both to re-establish himself as a romantic lead (not hitherto his accustomed metier) and then to undercut his new image, since this Orlando is played as unready and even naive. 

The play’s two chief casualties are its commentators. John Normington’s Touchstone has an authoritative moment when he discovers the virtues of ‘if,’ but most of the comic routines baffle him. He is the victim, too, of the evening’s only arrant misdirection; since the play makes it clear that he marries Audrey as the only means of being her, it seems perverse to have her ready to drop her knickers for any male in Arden. It may be odd to nominate Mr. Bryant’s Jaques (looking like an unfrocked don) as a casualty, since his is outwardly the most accomplished performance on hand, but his cynicism is allowed too easy and unchallenged a path through the play. 

I seem to have spent most of my space on the fault-finding, but Mr. Dexter’s work is assured enough to make this a stimulating rather than a dispiriting occupation. His stagecraft, as expected, is excellent; the Olivier looks negotiable again.