As You Like It
Soulpepper Theatre Company
The National Post

Soulpepper's first Shakespeare production, eight years ago, was Twelfth Night, directed by Albert Schultz, in which experienced actors played the below-stairs characters and young and untried ones handled the love interest. It didn't work out too well; the older players stole the show, not just because of their greater experience but because the text itself handed them the opportunity. The same tactic is tried in the company's new As You Like It, again directed by Schultz, with far happier results. Some weathered stalwarts have supporting roles, and they are great, but the burden in this play has to fall on the young ones -- in this case the first generation of Soulpepper's academy -- and they shoulder it with considerable sensitivity and contagiously high spirits.

The opening orchard scene finds the actors gathering apples. There are more apples when the play moves to the Forest of Arden; the banished lords, pastoral exiles, get to munch them. An As You Like It with apples is a conventional As You Like It, and so this production proves. Costumed in non-specific modern dress, and with the various songs set as bluegrass, it takes the play pretty much as it comes. But then so, I suspect, did its author, who knew from themes -- in this case the realities and illusions of romantic love--but not from concepts. The pastoral convention, contrasting the suspect sophistication of the court with the supposed simplicities of the country, is a convention, not a subject. The play uses it, but is not about it. A production could make more of it than this one does, but it doesn't have to. The important thing is that the words and the action should be intelligible and they should be entertaining, and this show scores highly on both counts.

The junior players tend to turn the verse into sing-song; this is a shame, but it isn't a calamity, considering how much of the play -- and how much of the best of it -- is in prose. This includes the great mock-wooing scene in which Rosalind, in man's disguise, instructs her unknowing lover Orlando in the real facts of life ("men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love"), all the while falling deeper and deeper herself. Sarah Wilson, a tall and tart Rosalind, gets the balance very well, though she's stronger on the disillusion than the illusion. She grows steadily through the play -- she's especially good at telling off the spoiled shepherdess Phebe -- and by the end is the enchantress she should be; she earns the right to speak the epilogue. (Wilson is the only actor I know of to have passed through both the Stratford Conservatory and the Soulpepper Academy; she should be exceptionally well-schooled.)

Michael Blake's Orlando has presence and a welcome degree of humour. His big, bad brother Oliver, traditionally an unrewarding role, is exceptionally well played by Mike Ross, who makes a forceful jealous villain with a streak of self-doubt that lets him mature into a suitable suitor when it's time for him, too, to be paired off.

As if this weren't enough, he's also the production's excellent musical director and plays the singing lord Amiens, a double role that involves him in some bemusingly quick changes. Jennifer Villaverde's Celia overdoes the pertness, likewise Amy Rutherford's Phebe, though she at least is able to turn it to self-satire; Krystin Pellerin's Audrey is, blessedly, a bucolic country wench who's funny without a hint of caricature. Kevin MacDonald is affectingly vulnerable as the love-struck Silvius; Stephen Guy-McGrath is excellent as his older buddy Corin, bringing off another unrecognizable double as Charles, a wrestler who's here done up in full professional gear. His bout with Orlando is very entertainingly done, both of them playing shamelessly to the on-stage audience. Equally well done, in a different vein, is the late quartet for unaccompanied voices on the meaning of love: "Like the howling of Irish wolves against the moon," says Rosalind, typically but not quite accurately, especially as she's part of it herself. Another young Academician, Lorenzo Savoini, has designed the set, which has elegant pillars (town) turning to spindly trees (country). Nice, though I wondered about the two red rocks lurking at the back of the forest. Sandstone?

As for the seniors, Diego Matamoros offers (can you bear to hear this?) another superb performance of the melancholy Jacques, a professed outsider who yet demands to be the the centre of attention: He graphically acts out the “Seven Ages of Man”, and also display an uncommon ambition -- in this role, anyway -- to be a rock star. Oliver Dennis's Touchstone, the more professional clown, is a dry and sparkling put-down artist; he also, reminding us of his Lucky in Waiting for Godot, has to carry a lot of baggage, literally. Michael Hanrahan is an urbane usurper apt to turn dangerously nasty. William Webster, though the halest stage octogenarian I've ever seen (he looks as if he should be carrying Orlando on his back rather than vice versa) is a splendid old Adam, and reappears for the ceremonial ending as Hymen the god of marriage, a role in which he beams radiant good will-- though it's unfortunate that he has to do it from the side of the stage rather than where this character belongs, dead centre.

The production is slapdash in some of its other choices. Duke Frederick subjects Oliver to a waterboarding, that being the most topical of tortures; too much dialogue is underscored by the splashing of water or the bleating of lambs, and by both at once at one crucial point. I don't see why "the second son of old Sir Rowland" shouldn't be allowed to announce himself as such when he makes his last-minute appearance; coincidence and Shakespearean comedy are hardly strangers. But the ancestral, eye-pricking magic that lies within this play is fully released in the multiple pairings at the end. Soulpepper has yet to offer us a great Shakespeare production, but this is their best try yet.