As You Like It: the RSC’s pared-down production is superb family-friendly fun
One of the pleasures distinguishing the RSC’s Shakespeare productions from most is how much attention is paid to making the Bard’s language as accessible as possible to modern ears.
In Brendan O’Hea’s charming staging of As You Like It in the Holloway Garden Theatre, so much work has gone into clarifying both the enunciation and pace of delivery of the language – even though the performers are helpfully mic’d up. Thanks to Emma Woodvine’s work on voice and text, this is such a striking feature that although all the players – who sing, dance and play instruments – shine bright as an ensemble, the star turn belongs to the poetry itself.
That clarity of purpose extends to how judiciously the play has been pared back to squeeze it into 80 minutes. Love, fun and comedy set to music are the guiding principles here. The play could just as easily be called Four Weddings and a Banishment. While the spine of the gender-swapped story of four pairs of would-be lovers adventuring in the Forest of Arden remains intact, the script has been mined for its most humorous bits to ensure that the production is as family-friendly as possible. This means that the extremes of Jaques’ melancholia, for example, have been excised.
On press night, Luke Brady who portrays Orlando had injured his ankle and performed the whole play seated at the side of the stage. Although he was static, it didn’t detract from the storytelling or dim his performance in any way because the energy in his voice carried the same consummate strength as if he had been moving around.
In fact, the production deftly made a virtue of this misfortune with the tongue-in-cheek delivery of lines like Rosalind’s “sir, you have wrestled well.” And how did the production handle said wrestling match, a major plot point of the story, in light of Brady’s injury? By having Peter Dukes’ Charles the Wrestler perform a one-man wrestling match, of course. It was possibly one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen on stage. Other elements, such as Liam Bunster’s character specific costumes, added to the sense of fun and frolics. Celia’s Bo Peep-chic was inspired.
Is there a Shakespeare play that more perfectly lends itself to an outside venue? After seeing this production at the Holloway Garden Theatre, with its forest-like setting beside the River Avon and the incidental honking of geese giving an extra bucolic touch, I don’t think so!
Until Sept 1; rsc.org.uk