Maria Aberg’s King John for the RSC last year got up some folk’s noses like a little finger. Pre-publicity this season may have suggested that the Swedish-born director might be intending to give a similarly vigorous seeing-to to this festive comedy. In the event, she has walked a canny line between rendering it contemporary and preserving its keen sense of locality: the play’s Forest of Arden may superficially be the Ardennes, but at heart it is the Arden just a few miles from Stratford.
    
Here, Duke Senior and his fellow lords in exile make for a raggle-taggle band of patrician neo-folkies, giving the impression that Rosalind, Orlando and the others in effect run away to the forest to live with Mumford & Sons. Brit award-winner Laura Marling’s score is sinewy contemporary folk: the early songs of the minstrel-lord Amiens recall Nick Drake, but others are heavily rewritten from their Shakespearean form and still others newly composed, so that for instance the multiple weddings at the end are celebrated with a rustic take on the “Bo Diddley” riff.
    
Alex Waldmann and Pippa Nixon did sterling service for Aberg at the centre of last year’s production, and do so again here. Waldmann is the most natural Orlando I have seen, even when picking out “I Walk The Line” on a piano accordion, never mind pitching woo to a young man pretending to be Rosalind but who in fact is Rosalind in cross-dressed disguise. Nixon’s Rosalind/“Ganymede” looks very much like a 21st-century drag king; she is occasionally over-demonstrative of gesture, but hits the right notes when it matters. Nicolas Tennant’s Touchstone begins grimly but loosens up to the point of quasi-ad-libbing for a couple of minutes with an audience member. The weakest link is Oliver Ryan, who I suspect set out to find a convincing real-life psychological profile for the melancholy Jaques but whose research has simply led him to turn in the kind of overwrought performance that makes one wish Jaques had remembered to take his Lithium with him into exile.
    
Nevertheless, the evening as a whole is progressively seductive, even if there turns out to be half an hour too much of it. As I left the theatre, wafting across to me on the spring night air came the faint but unmistakable aroma of a spliff.

Written for the Financial Times.