As You Like It
Roundhouse   January-February 2011

Shakespeare's brightest and happiest romantic comedy is given a bright and happy production by the Royal Shakespeare Company as part of their too-brief London season.

There are a few minor stumbles, but nothing to keep you from full enjoyment of this warm and healthful play.

This is the one about the girl disguised as a boy, who meets the boy she loves and gets him to practice his wooing on her while trying to keep herself from jumping him. There's a lot of witty chat about sentimental and more cool-headed views of love, and on the relative attractions of court and countryside, and everything ends as happily as you know from the start it must.

This play lives and dies with its Rosalind, and Katy Stephens gives her all the bouncy joy of a teenager in love, along with the more mature awareness that her Orlando's own soppy romanticism has to be tested and tempered with a little common sense before she can give herself over to it. Most Rosalinds capture either the being-in-love or the cool-headedness, but few can show and let us enjoy the conflict between the two as delightfully as Stephens does.

Orlando himself can be a bit of a stick, but Jonjo O'Neill nicely rounds him out, bringing alive his intense frustration in the early scenes and the way escape from the court enables him to relax and even enjoy the mock wooing game with his new pal.

Mariah Gale makes a nicely tart Celia, James Tucker is touching as the lovesick shepherd Silvius, and Geoffrey Freshwater brings effortless warmth to the older shepherd Corin.

I've got some reservations about Forbes Masson's whitefaced Jaques, whose melancholy is obviously a pose, with every effect played for the benefit of an imagined adoring audience. And the biggest disappointment is Richard Katz's thoroughly unfunny Touchstone, the actor driven to shouting and pratfalls in a desperate attempt at laughs.

Director Michael Boyd  continues the RSC tradition of absolutely clear speaking of the verse, though his actors have / a distracting tendency to / pause every two or / three words without / regard for meaning.

And as with his Antony and Cleopatra, Boyd shows too little sensitivity to the fluid requirements of a long thrust stage, constantly planting actors in one spot so they have their backs to a third of the audience, or block the view of other actors, for long stretches.

Despite a lot of small textual cuts, including the Epilogue (replaced by a song), the play runs the RSC's obligatory three hours, though I doubt you will find many slow moments in it.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - As You Like It - RSC Roundhouse 2011