As You Like It
Old Vic Theatre   Summer 2010

The most frustrating shows to review are the ones that are O. K. but no better. Someone new to Shakespeare who saw this production of one of his best romantic comedies would find some laughs, some sweetness, and a lot of dull stretches, and go away thinking that's what Shakespeare is supposed to be like.

Well, it isn't, and a really good production of this play isn't just O. K., but a total delight. And that gap, between what is delivered here and what could be, keeps me from being able to recommend this, unless one or another of the performers is a favourite of yours.

This is one of Shakespeare's transvestite comedies - girl disguises as boy and then meets the man she loves, who doesn't recognise her. She gets him to do some role-playing, practicing his wooing while she plays the girl and fights the impulse to tear off her disguise and jump his bones.

That's the quality that is most missing in this Sam Mendes-directed production with a mixed British and American cast - the warm comedy that arises from knowing that there are two people in love here and that their confusion and frustration can be enjoyed precisely because we know how easily it can be corrected.

Juliet Rylance is lovely, charming and perky-as-all-get-out as Rosalind, and indeed she provides much of the evening's fun. But her Rosalind is too uninvolved and in control for too much of the time, not letting us see how much she is frantically improvising to keep him from walking away, while frustrating herself by making herself listen passively (or pretend to judge critically) as he makes his declarations of love.

Too much in the production has that just-missing-the-point quality. Jaques, the professional melancholiac who hovers around the edges of things being glum, can be presented as philosophical or foolish (or both), but Stephen Dillane just makes him lugubrious, so slow and inexpressive of speech that you're surprised he hasn't forgotten the beginning of a sentence before he reaches the end of it.

I think I can see what the set, costume and lighting designers were up to in making the first scenes so dark and dull to look at, but the effect is to make the opening scenes dark and dull, as well as slow-moving.

No, the pleasures of this As You Like It are in Juliet Rylance's personality, in some nice comic turns among the secondary cast, particularly Anthony O'Donnell and Thomas Sadoski, and above all in the inherent loveliness and life-affirming warm humour of Shakespeare's play, which comes through even without much help from the production.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - As You Like It - Old Vic - 2010