As You Like It is a bit like the What You Will bit of Twelfth Night: a winsome frothy title that tells you next to nothing about the play it belongs to. To our modern ears the phrase echoes a welcome instruction from childhood: Do as you like! It’s the sort of thing your teacher might have said on the last day of a busy term. This carefree overtone may go some way to explaining why As You Like It is often staged as a romp through a rural idyll: all spring flowers and cross dressed flirting.
Michael Boyd has looked a lot further than the title in the RSC’s current production, now at the Courtyard theatre in Stratford. Boyd has understood that exile from court for the Duke and his followers is losing everything. How would you cope if job, car and house were suddenly taken? This is a question even some of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s audience members are beginning to contemplate with an increasing unease born of the knowledge that most people are two missed mortgage payments from the street. It is winter in the forest of Arden and not everyone will be as lucky as Corin, the luckless shepherd, who gets rescued by Rosalind and Celia. I do not mean to suggest that Boyd has opened up a can of Mike Leigh on Shakespeare’s much loved comedy; it is simply that the amount of thought and detail in his production exploded my lazy, preconceived notions of what the play was about.
The piece opens in Duke Frederick’s sombre, severe court where all are clad in black, even to the eyeliner, and dance to a martial beat. Sandy Neilson gives a spiky, paranoid performance as the usurper: the wonder is that he has any subjects left by the time he banishes Rosalind without reason. Arden is no Eden but Katy Stephens is in clover once she gets out of her stifling black corset and into Ganymede’s gear. She delivers a spirited, liberated Rosalind and it’s easy to see why Jonjo O’Neill’s Orlando vandalises so many trees in praise of her – a detail cleverly incorporated into Tom Piper’s versatile woodland set.
Get down to Stratford and see it before the bailiffs get hold of your car and cancel your cards. You’ll like it.
