After the summer production at Shakespeare’s Globe, this is London’s second major As You Like It of 2015 to show numerous strengths and detailed directorial intelligence, yet ultimately to misfire. Polly Findlay begins with a magnificent stroke: the scenes at the ducal court are set, in Lizzie Clachan’s design, in a modern brokerage house, with stock price screens and gaudy blazers all over the place. It’s a fine analogue for Duke Frederick’s unforgiving court, even if it’s inexplicable why, for instance, a wrestling match might take place in the office.

Then it all falls apart, literally. The office furniture is flown up so that the “forest” consists of columns of dangling desks, chairs and power stanchions hanging above a black mud/gravel surface. A choir sits on seats in mid-air, providing wind and animal noises as well as backing for the clutch of songs. I was prepared to go along with an interpretation which looks for the bleakness in even Shakespeare’s festive comedies, but I could see no consistent basis for this conceptualisation. Either the modern-dressed cast are homeless in a city (in which case the exiled Duke Senior’s line “Come, shall we go and kill us venison?” might as well refer to scavenging in the dumpsters behind the local Waitrose), or this is truly meant to be a forest, complete with a hilarious sequence featuring most of the cast as grazing sheep, which means no continuity of ideas with the court scenes, just a series of interesting wheezes without an overarching concept that’s more than visual. The text, too, is edited, reordered and updated, sometimes needlessly if not downright inexplicably.

Rosalie Craig’s workaday Rosalind in her double gender-bend romance is eclipsed by Patsy Ferran, so accomplished at playing adolescent, who portrays Celia as if on vacation from Malory Towers. Mark Benton’s Touchstone is a great fur-coated bear of a deadpan clown, but the talented Paul Chahidi labours too hard to make the melancholy Jaques really, really melancholy. Overall, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of Shakespearean comedies like this one which focus on a period of misrule. They’re not avoiding the grim realities of everyday, just catching breath away from them. Transient escapism is not denial.

Written for the Financial Times.