Directed by Alex Kendall Robson, this is a marvellous presentation of a Shakespearean classic.
Full disclosure: As You Like It is one of my favourite Shakespearean plays, and its protagonist, Rosalind, is certainly my favourite Shakespearean heroine.
Rosalind is whip-smart but no fool. (With such a penchant for paradox, might I wear motley?) What I mean is that Rosalind is witty but humble; she entertains no hubristic dreams that her intelligence makes her superior to the world and its grand forces. This being a romantic comedy, the grand force is Love. Rosalind accepts Love’s power – but knows that this power does not automatically grant romantic Love pre-eminence in the human experience.
Rosalind might have said Love is the silliest of the serious things. Instead Shakespeare gives her lines like these:
Men have died from time to time and worms have eaten them, but not for love.
Love is merely a madness, and, I tell you, deserves as well a dark house and a whip as madmen do; and the reason why they are not so punished and cured is that the lunacy is so ordinary that the whippers are in love too.
Shakespeare gifts us a heroine who is both bubbly and balanced, who both feels and thinks.
Jade Fuda’s portrayal of Rosalind is absolutely brilliant. And I found it a wonderfully fresh interpretation: more giggly and more fraught than customary, and this tender vulnerability, coupled with Fuda’s total command of the wit, makes her portrayal of Rosalind extraordinarily rich.
As You Like It is one of my favourites for other reasons. It includes one of my favourite scenes in the whole of English drama, the one in which Celia accepts exile rather than part from Rosalind. In a play centring on romantic Love, here’s a shining example of a different type of love: friendship. It’s a scene that always brings tears to my eyes, and played here by Fuda and Larissa Turton as Celia it did so again.
The play also features some of Shakespeare’s greatest poetry.
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
So says the Duchess, exiled to the Forest of Arden by her tyrannical sister. The two roles are doubled superbly by Sonya Kerr in a performance that excels both physically and vocally, and with glorious authority juxtaposes compassion and cruelty.
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players
So says the melancholy Jaques. Sure, this most famous of lines could simply be read as a case of professional myopia: if Shakespeare had been a footballer he might have said All the world’s a game; or if he had been a risk assessor, All the world’s an accident waiting to happen; or a fisherman, All the world smells of fish. But Shakespeare the dramatist captured something of Life’s bewildering, and perhaps unbearable, lightness – the sense that it all deeply matters, but at the same time, it all doesn’t matter that much. Kendall Robson plays Jaques with splendid humour and a show-stopping poignancy.
O, how bitter a thing it is to look into happiness through another man’s eyes!
So says Orlando, in a stinging moment when it seems his brother has secured love but he never will. Traditionally, Orlando is a challenging role; lover of the effervescent Rosalind, there’s always the danger he may not seem worthy of her, a smaller man than Love’s grand game of hide-and-seek in which he is a prime participant. But here, Pat Mandziy creates a magnificent Orlando, a beautiful balance of confusion and charisma.
So, as I suggested, a play of unparalleled poetry. (And I think we get almost the whole thing!) The entire ensemble is exemplary; with a mastery of the Elizabethan language and a complete commitment to comic exuberance, we’re invited to a world of delight.
Paul Gilchrist
As You Like It by William Shakespeare
presented by Fingerless Theatre
at Flight Path Theatre until March 14
Image by Phil Erbacher
Theatre Red 