Time Is Suspended in This Bizarre Place
As You Like It
The Stratford Festival
The National Post
There's no clock in the forest. That is what Orlando, the hero of As You Like It, tells Rosalind, the heroine-disguised- as-a-boy, when they meet in the Forest of Arden and she asks him the time.
A moment later, she's reading him an elegant lecture on the nature of time.
It's like being back at the Shaw Festival with J. B. Priestley's Conway family, though of course the thoughts are subtler and the language richer.
In this play, time is suspended and a significant percentage of the cast live in a state of perpetual courtship.
It's difficult to find a theatrical image that will denote the absence of something. The best you can do is illustrate its presence somewhere else, which is what Jeannette Lambermont's Stratford production does.
The pre-forest scenes are dominated by a couple of dark revolving wheels, with interlocking cogs and with a pendulum swinging between them. Occasionally a savage ringing assaults our ears; the Duke and his retainers are living in a huge alarm-clock. No wonder people keep taking off for the woods.
The play ends in a quadruple wedding, presided over by Hymen, god (or, in this production, goddess) of marriage. In this staging, Hymen comes equipped with another clock as if to say that holiday is over and that real life is to begin again, though on more hopeful terms.
The legitimate Duke, Rosalind's father, is to resume his dukedom; the couples have to make their relationships work. This is all very stimulating, though not very attractive visually.
Even Hymen's wedding-present clock looks grubby; and though the central forest scenes don't have time pieces, they're still lumbered with the production's permanent set, whose main feature is a broad curving ramp, and whose gestures towards the outdoors consist of lowering some ropes for trees, and backing everything with a green screen.
It isn't naturalistically convincing or sparely suggestive; and it certainly isn't pretty. The best you can say for it is that it permits some interesting groupings.
Its brutalism is the more perplexing, because this isn't a brutalist production. It's a stringent, and its' both sensitive and inventive. It's especially good at cross-reference, pointing up not just the obvious contrast between court and country, but the unexpected variations within the forest itself.
Counterpoint and overlap abound. It's a bizarre place, Shakespeare's Arden. It's an all-purpose green world, part farmland and part jungle, switching at will between agricultural realism and literary convention. Lionesses prowl and sheep are herded; a latter- day gang of Robin Hoods hide out there, but there seems to be easy access to and from the next village. Lucy Peacock is not, except in the epilogue, one of those Rosalinds with whom the whole audience falls irresistibly in love.
But she is witty and accomplished and especially good in the wonderful central scenes where the disguised Rosalind gives Orlando merrily disillusioned instruction on the nature of love, so that the two of them may get closer to the real thing.
All these scenes, by the way, are in prose: probably the greatest prose in the English language. It's a medium that seems to suit both her and her Orlando, Donald Carrier; he's less happy with his few passages of verse, but then Orlando is meant to be a lousy poet, a fact with which this production has more fun than most.
Brian Tree, a spiky-haired Touchstone, is split between playing the professional zany, at which he is tiresome, and the common sense commentator, at which he is delightful.
(It's a matter of taste, I guess, as are the decorations that festoon his scenes. I couldn't take the toy boat that he sails on an imaginary stream, but I had no objection to the three actors in goat- masks who attend his wooing of Audrey.) As Celia, Jacklyn Francis aims, I think, at pert, but mostly gets stuck at shrill.
Juan Chioran is striking as the melancholy Jaques. As far as I can see, the only thing preventing Chioran from being a major Shakespearean actor is that he doesn't seem to fit any of the major Shakespearean roles, except perhaps Iago.
The minor players here all have at least a moment each. I especially liked the villains: Robert Benson an implacable Frederick, and Jonathan Goad a more malleable malefactor as Orlando's bad-brother Oliver. The goodies have an eloquent champion in Joseph Shaw's old Adam. Shakespeare himself is traditionally supposed to have played the part.
The songs are mainly delightful, beautifully sung (by Steve Ross) and beautifully set (by Keith Thomas); the only exceptions are “A Lover and his Lass”, which is inexplicably thrown away, and Hymen's wedding-chant, which is tacky, though not as tacky as the pas de deux that goes with it.
Students of the play might note that it has lost a character. Orlando's and Oliver's brother, "the second son of old Sir Rowland," no longer appears at the end to tie up the plot; that function is now performed by Charles, the wrestler from the first two scenes. (He's greeted by name; just as well since it's hours since we last saw him.) There is a fitness here. At the play's opening Charles spoke wistfully of the golden world of Arden; now he arrives there, to summon the characters home. In other words, he re-starts the clock.