A
Midsummer Night’s Dream may be more widely held as a favourite
Shakespeare comedy, but there is something about the gender switchback
of
As You Like It that makes
audience and actors uniquely complicit in overturning conventions.
There are enough occasions in Shakespeare when women disguise
themselves as men, but only Rosalind when pretending to be Ganymede
then prevails upon her suitor Orlando to pretend that “he”, Ganymede,
is Rosalind and woo her/him/her. (Of course, a fourth twist was present
in original productions when Rosalind was played by a boy.) We commit
ourselves together to this playfulness and embarrassment of
psychosexual riches.
Thea Sharrock’s first-ever Shakespeare production is the third
As You Like It I have seen so far
this year, and is neither the best nor the worst. It is by and large a
straight interpretation (
pace
the gender-bending a-go-go). Naomi Frederick is acceptably androgynous,
but does not impose any exaggeratedly laddish persona upon her
Ganymede; in a nice touch, though, her masculine attire is identical to
that of Orlando. In that role, Jack Laskey is every inch the late
adolescent, with a strong yet appealing undercurrent of flippancy
running through his portrayal. In contrast Dominic Rowan’s Touchstone
seldom lets you see him working for laughs, and is the better for it;
Rowan’s comic forte is to be earnest to the point of pomposity 90% of
the time and spend the remainder in ludicrous self-deflation. I am less
convinced by Tim McMullan’s Jaques, who is not so much melancholy as
languid, perhaps even permanently half-pissed; his Seven Ages of Man
speech seems downright desultory.
Sharrock uses the entire space of the Globe: characters regularly enter
and exit through the groundlings’ pit (Orlando’s early wrestling match
even spills off the stage into it), Jaques is discovered at various
points amongst the audience on each of the theatre’s three levels, and
Orlando’s love poems come fluttering down on us from the topmost
gallery. She also nips and tucks the script comprehensively,
rearranging scenes, excising superfluous characters, unintelligibly
archaic references and turns of phrase. This is carried to excess – do
we really need “withal” to be repeatedly trimmed back to “with”? The
production plugs nicely into the performance dynamics of the Globe and
makes for an enjoyable summer evening, but it stands out not at all.
Written for the Financial
Times.