REVIEW: As You Like It, RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre

We are informed at the outset that the bare stage we see before us will house a rehearsal of the play by a reassembled cast that first did it in 1978. One of the actors has since passed away so an overcoat signifies his role. All fine and dandy except there is a mite too much wavering around the conceit for my liking. Is it an am-dram as suggested by the occasional flubs, or was it originally a professional production whose rebirth the cast are struggling to cope with? And if it’s a rehearsal, why are we, the audience, acknowledged so often when we really shouldn’t be here bearing witness at all?

That said, we'll let that all rest for a moment because before we get down to brass tacks it’s only right and proper to acknowledge that, whatever the motive behind the players being pensionable, this is a hugely enjoyable play. Geraldine James is a wonderful Rosalind, coquettish, determined, strong-willed and gallant. Forgive me if I pause again for a second but it would be remiss of me not to point out that when Ms James is playing Rosalind in disguise as Ganymede and because in Shakespeare’s time all girls were played by boys, what we have here is an older person playing a younger person who would have been a boy playing a girl playing a boy who, when tutoring Orlando, is pretending to be a girl. So that’s an oldster playing a younger boy playing a girl playing a boy playing a girl! Ta-dah! Gauntlet duly thrown down to future productions. Beat that!

Anyway, on with the show. Maureen Beattie’s ace as anything as Rosalind's faithful, occasionally sage sounding board and sidekick Celia. Malcolm Sinclair’s a sympathetic Orlando, perpetually in a state of confusion, and there’s a wealth of chortling largely thanks to the verbal to-ing and fro-ing between Celia Bannerman’s lusty Phoebe and David Fielder’s simpering shepherd Silvius. The usual proliferation of dukes and their heirs are carried out in suitably duke-and-heirlike fashion (although Robin Soans’ Duke Frederick’s a bit panto baddie) and David Sibley’s Corin is a dangerous man with a pitchfork.

It would probably not be too daft to surmise that the notion behind this production was prompted by the play’s most famous speech, the one where the melancholy Greek chorus character Jaques recounts the seven ages of man. If so, the unfortunate non-appearance of Oliver Cotton due to illness may have robbed us of a pivotal moment. Stand-in Christopher Saul has a stalwart crack at filling the void but the speech is delivered with muted impact from a bench way to the back of the stage so we lack what might have been a bit of a revelation.

The second half is better than the first and it’s credit to the cast that we ofttimes forget the incongruity of the accumulated years and get sucked into the plot. Mostly responsible for this is James Hayes who, in playing Touchstone The Fool, delights in breaching the fourth wall. Suffered to wear a ridiculous pinyatta outfit, he mournfully introduces himself to us as, “James Hayes, classical actor”, and at one point he stops to inform us he has no idea what the line he’s just uttered actually means, then expounds his theory that it’s something to do with the murder of Shakespeare’s fellow playwright Christopher Marlowe. Cue howls of laughter and it’s all jolly good fun but my point is that the way this production has chosen to proceed, most of the audience enjoyment has less to do with the play itself and mostly to do with how the cast muck about with it - the flustering over the lines, the script assists, all the stuff brought to bear by the faux rehearsal scenario.

Whatever, I feel it never quite achieves what it might. When the RSC gender-swopped in the recent production of the Tempest, the casting of Alex Kingston as Prospero emphatically imbued the play with a moving maternal heft, introducing an emotional dimension to the play’s principal relationships never visited before. Nothing quite like that happens here. Not much is made of the fact that the cast have acted in the play as their younger selves so are now performing it with more experiences behind them. Nor is there any real mining of the presumption that many of them will have endured and survived complicated romantic situations over the course of their real lives. In fact, the only real reference to the past production seems to be that now they need a lot more line-prompting and that they find the physical aspect of the action a little uncomfortable. As for having any wisdom to impart about the trials and tribulations of falling in love, they appear to have none. All and sundry behave like soppy, mooning adolescents.

Maybe that’s the point. Maybe what this production is saying is that we are all helpless, no matter what each of our personal calendars say, when Cupid’s arrow strikes. If so, then ok. But the epilogue, tacked on at the end and nicely delivered by Geraldine James to make a bunch of points about gender-bias and ageism seems to me an admission that the play hasn’t fully theatrically delivered on its potential.

There is a reveal at the climax which I won’t spoil for you but I think it’s supposed to represent some kind of Janus-faced shift towards eternity or heaven or some such concept, perhaps acknowledging on the one hand Shakespeare’s genius enduring into the future and on the other wistfully reflecting the passing of time via the cast’s long-gone previous production. Admittedly I’m making all this bit up because it’s not really clear what it’s all about.

And maybe I’m going on a bit too much about the age thing. After all, while they may have spectacles on nose and pouch on side, their youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide for their shrunk shanks, they’re hardly sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans anything actually. Plus, of course, they have as much right to this chunk of the Bard as anybody else. I’m minded, actually, of a pretty good zombie comedy movie Jim Jarmusch made some five years back called The Dead Don’t Die. To filch his title somewhat, we could rename this As You Like It, The Old Don’t Age. Good on ‘em. But what the heck ever happened to teenage kicks?