Review: Colin on The Bridge Project As You Like It

A pair of crossed reviews: Also be sure to read our other review of The Bridge Project As You Like It.

Eureka! I have it – I’ve worked out what’s wrong with the Sam Mendes-directed As You Like It which is currently playing to packed houses at The Old Vic. It’s taken me a couple of weeks to work it out because, on the surface, there is nothing especially wrong with this production, which features the first of two Shakespeare plays being staged as part of this year’s Bridge project (itself in its second of three planned years).

The play itself, you see, is an endless delight; snaps for Will Shakespeare on that score. The set design is excellent, with a frontage of gnarled wooden boards lifting up to reveal the Forest of Arden as the action of the play relocates. The lighting design, too, deserves a special mention for the way in which it subtly and perfectly communicates the seasonal changes that lie, almost imperceptibly, behind every utterance in the play: the opening scenes in the Forest take place in the blue-black semi-dark of winter mornings and early-evenings, the latter scenes in the soft warm glow reminiscent of an early-evening in summer.

The direction is very good, sensitive throughout, and often witty. When Jacques (Stephen Dillane) adds his scurrilous verse to Amiens’ haunting rendition of ‘Under the greenwood tree’, he does so as Bob Dylan, replete with thick-rimmed glasses, folksy stylings, and a handy harmonica. Another song, ‘What shall he have that killed the deer’, is presented as a dream of Celia’s/Aliena’s who sleeps centre-stage while the psychodrama in which the hunters daub themselves in blood and crown their champion with a deer’s antlers takes place. This last innovation is the more impressive because it is presented directly before Orlando’s bloody adventure with the lion is related by Oliver, thereby setting the tone for the narration of an event which, especially in isolation, can seem just too incredible in a play which always keeps its feet on the cold ground, at least until the entrance of Hymen in Act V. Incidentally, Mendes does away with Hymen, or at least, he leaves the potential for emphasizing the supernatural in the role unrealised, giving the god’s lines to a beguilingly local master of ceremonies. It is no surprise that Mendes chooses to make much of the strain of anti-pastoralism in the play–it is the fashion–but he should be commended precisely because he does not let that strain overawe the symphony of which it is only one element.

Image credit: BAM website.

Elsewhere, Adam’s death, at the feast Orlando finally brings him to, is poignant and well-managed (it also makes sense of his disappearance from the text), while the scene in which Rosalind first contemplates the effect Orlando’s appearance has had on her (I.iii) opens with her lying in bed seemingly post-orgasm, thereby assuring us that the director has not ignored the play’s undeniable sexiness.

We are coming, though, to the problem. Originally I wrote a long paragraph here giving my views on each of the cast, and then I expunged it. I expunged it because all of the cast had the same problem (THE problem) excepting, naturally, Edward Bennett. It would be hard for Mad Shakespeare to be more of an Edward Bennett groupie than it/we already are, having seen him upstage David Tennant so brilliantly in the RSC’s Hamlet two years ago, and he doesn’t disappoint here either. To be honest, it’s worth going to see this just for Bennett’s performance as Oliver (smallish part though it is) but we’re blathering and will now return to the problem, and the problem is/was this: none of the cast handled/tongued the verses or the prose speeches well at all. I could waste time commending various aspects of every performance in the play, but the mess that was made of voicing the text would render this praise pointless. I lost count of the number of times good jokes/potential laughs fell flat because the punchline was garbled or lost because of a faulty rhythm, and almost every actor spoke too fast, which led to the smothering of most of the play’s finest prose speeches.

The way in which Shakespearean poetry is delivered by actors is not a primary concern for me when I go and see a production – perhaps that is why it took me so long to realise what blunted this production’s edge. Nevertheless, this production brought home to me, as none has ever done before, that it is an extremely important aspect of staging Shakespeare. Thinking about it now I realise that I have seen several Shakespeare plays in the last couple of years that were afflicted with the same disease (the RSC’s 1 Henry IV at the Roundhouse, for example).

The thought that occurs to me now, as I draw my review to a close, is that I could, having seen this production, have done without the excellence of the direction if the play had only been excellently spoken.

As You Like It plays at the Old Vic Theatre in London, UK until 21 August 2010.