Review: AS YOU LIKE IT, RSC Stratford Upon Avon

Actors, most older than even your senior railcard holding reviewer, have gathered in a rehearsal room to give As You Like It another go, a play they last performed in 1978. They’re older, one isn’t with us in every sense, but there are four young ‘uns to help them for the minor parts and with a few prompts if necessary. 

As a framing device, it’s not a bad one, particularly for a play that has many references to the power of memory and how moments can consign so many to irrelevance, new memories made as lives change. It had a specific resonance for me, as I had first seen this play at the Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith in 1991, Cheek by Jowl’s celebrated all-male production with Adrian Lester as an unforgettable Rosalind. I saw that very show 23 years later (with my son, who had not been around the first time) at a screening, at the end of which the original cast, most heavier, all more lined in the face, some rather sheepishly, came forward at the curtain. It was a moving experience, reviewed here.  

Omar Elerian commits fully to his conceit, directing his cast to play their roles not as a pantomime of youth, but as men and women in their twilight years. There’s scope, fully utilised, to bring out the poignancy in Shakespeare’s text, cut and focused judiciously, much to dramaturg, Rebecca Latham’s, credit. We get an early sense of what is to come with the slo-mo wrestling match between Ewart James Walter’s Charles and Malcolm Senior’s Orlando, the two alpha males fighting back pain and joint aches as much as each other. Old men shouldn’t fight, but that merely raises the question as to whether young men should either.

Such contemplations on the differences between what the old and young should do are flipped when Rosalind sets eyes on the victor of the bout. Geraldine James appears to lose all weight, floating on the roiling sea of love at first sight, girlish, but not fey - she should definitely pursue her man! 

Two thoughts came to mind, and I could tell by the reaction around me in the house that I was not alone. The first was the sharp prick of recalling when it happened to me, as clear as an HD YouTube video in my mind over 30 years on. The second was a reflection on the changing nature of love (Shakespeare’s great subject of course), how men and women past 70 need it to stave off loneliness, for comfort, for the communion of one with another that humans have needed since they sheltered in caves. At twentysomething, love is all about the joys to come, the possibilities, the stomach-tightening desire; at seventysomething, love is about that too, but also about swerving the bleak desert of a single life neither wanted nor expected.

The play itself isn’t particularly good, more a series of setpieces that lend themselves to fine performances - fortunately, they get them. Hannah Bristow stepped in for Maureen Beattie (indisposition being a foreseeable risk across this cast) and her Celia, now young enough to be Rosalind’s granddaughter, is very funny in her disdain for her friend’s playacting to woo Orlando. Christopher Saul’s Jaques delivers a subdued “Seven Ages Of Man” speech, freighted with the experience of having lived through them and with the prospect of the last one now very much on the horizon.

James Hayes goes full Eric Morecambe as Touchstone, breaking the fourth wall at will, clowning in an array of ever-more garish costumes and sailing very close to be too irritating for his own good, Achieving just as much with a character as restrained as Touchstone is flamboyant, David Fielder, has a lot of fun with his mooning shepherd, Silvius, who gets the girl in the end.

Robin Soans (excellent in doubling the good and bad Dukes) has written a bespoke epilogue beautifully delivered by Ms James - indeed, the line readings throughout provide a masterclass for any aspiring classical actors - and the newlyweds leave us to walk towards a darkened forest. Is that a rural idyll in which court intrigues and petty jealousies can be left behind or a dangerous home for bandits and bears? 

That’s pretty much how one thinks of one’s later years the closer one gets to them.   

As You Like It is at the RSC Stratford Upon Avon until 5 August

Photo Credit: Ellie Kurttz

  

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