Winter turns to richly amused spring, thanks to the rays of subtle love that warm Michael Boyd’s initially austere ‘As You Like It’. But the source is not the confected romance between witty heroine Rosalind and the ill-bred, noble-blooded wrestler, Orlando. It’s the beautifully ripening affection between Rosalind and her young cousin Celia – who follows her into the Forest of Arden, complaining
in a dog cart all the way – that makes Shakespeare’s pastoral-comical-philosophical romp so refreshing and heartfelt.
In the court of Celia’s father, who has usurped Rosalind’s, Mariah Gale’s Celia is wigged and whaleboned like a sad young Elizabeth I. Hypocrisy has usurped nature: the courtiers are well-oiled grovelling machines and spout creamily iambic lies. Katy Stephens’s Rosalind only really finds herself when she dons men’s clothes and escapes.
Stephens, who revelled in the superbitche roles of Queen Margaret and Joan of Arc in the RSC’s Histories, is a commanding actress in a whimsical part, but she makes a bold and enjoyable boy – when her Orlando shows up, it’s clear that she stays in male disguise because she likes to wear the trousers.
Gale’s Celia is a quiet revelation. A spoiled young heiress, she has little to do in the woods but listen to Rosalind and dream, yet she does both with such intensity that her growth from selfish girl to generous woman is a powerful theme.
Boyd’s Arden is a colder, more gruelling place than Merrie England’s greenleafed sanctuary: a peasant beheads a rabbit (to shrieks fromthe gallery); deer carcasses hang from the tree-house where Rosalind’s father and his men are on full rifle alert; the dun leather jackets, russet fur caps, fire, meat and sinews lend this refuge a harsh but handsome texture. Its humour ranges from crude (country girl Audrey is, literally, the butt of all jokes in her white micro-mini skirt) to Tim Minchin-esque ironic melancholy (Forbes Masson’s new age minstrel, Jacques). The climax is a sexual, dreamlike ritual of hunting with antlers. It’s strange, but the pagan spring is more powerful than a nostalgic Greenwood idyll.