As You Like It (21 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
The work of Polish academic Jan Kott’s
Shakespeare, Our Contemporary
(1964) influenced European productions such as Roberto Ciulli’s “coldly clinical staging” in Cologne in 1974 in which “love could not operate, and was not meant to”.
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Romanian director Petrica Ionescu’s 1976 production at Bochum featured an all-male cast in a set “suggesting a vandalized slaughterhouse or a war-damaged factory, with burst pipes, torn-off tiles and heaps of rubble.”
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Marshall argues that the most successful experiment was Peter Stein’s 1977 Berlin production, which “discovered a way to expose the pastoral’s political charge without destroying the structure of fantasy.”
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It was staged before the fall of the Berlin Wall, and “attending the play required audiences to venture outside the city, lending peculiar resonance for a Berlin audience surrounded by the GDR” involving an hour-long bus drive to the CCC Film Studios, where the first act was staged, after which the audience were “actually hounded from the hall by the sound of barking dogs playing over the sound system.” There was then a fifteen-minute walk to “Arden” which “passed through a dark, gusty maze, with dangling vines, dripping water, and occasional surprises such as a wild bear.”
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The changing cultural climate of the 1960s had introduced radical ideas about sexuality and the social construction of gender and a desire to explore the dark side of Shakespeare’s comedies. Clifford Williams’ 1967 all-male National Theatre production at the Old Vic provoked much critical comment. Despite Williams’ disclaimer, most saw the influence of Kott’s ideas on the production. Opinions were divided about “Ralph Koltai’s plastic décor—dangling transparent tubes and dappled overhead cut-outs, and a variety of silver boots, PVC macs, and tattered regimentals.”
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Williams was on record as saying “underlying all the love scenes between Orlando and Rosalind there is an incredible incandescent purity.”
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Most critics however thought the production sexless; more than one described Ronald Pickup playing Rosalind as “beaky,”
“long-legged,” and “nonerotic,”
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although others recognized how his performance grew:
toward the end, Pickup softens the queerness into something quite close to girlhood. By the time Shakespeare’s touching quartet arrives, he can read Rosalind’s “I for no woman” with a double meaning both effective and moving. And from then to the end he is wonderful, reading the epilogue as it had never been read before.
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The cast included Anthony Hopkins as Audrey “(the funniest of all performances)”
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and Robert Stephens as Jaques. Buzz Goodbody’s 1973 RSC production was a deliberate attempt to “win the play back for women.”
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Conventional productions built around a star actress were still current; Maggie Smith’s Rosalind formed “the comic mainspring of the production”
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in Robin Phillips’ production at the Stratford Festival Ontario in 1977. John Dexter, who had walked out on the National’s all-male version, directed their next in 1979 based on anthropologist J. G. Frazer’s
The Golden Bough
and dominated by a Tree of Life on which was strewn flowers and a red garland of the innards from the slaughtered deer of Act 4. William was smeared with the deer’s blood and crowned with its antlers, while
other actors gathered round him wearing beautifully expressive deer masks. In the finale, the stage was completely surrounded by these ‘deer’, with William as an antlered Hymen, naked except for fronds of leaves—a rustic god with whom Rosalind had joined forces to provide the ‘rites’ for her wedding.
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Productions since then have veered between radical explorations of the play’s politics, gender, and sexuality, and a view of it as a quintessentially English romp through the countryside. The first of many open-air performances was staged at Coombe House, Kingston-upon-Thames, in June 1885, and it was performed in the 1933 inaugural season of the Open Air Theatre in London’s Regent’s Park. It remains a popular choice for outdoor venues with local groups.
The possibilities such outdoor productions offer, particularly their democratic potential, have been capitalized on in America, notably in Joseph Papp’s 1973 production at the Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park, which featured pop singer Meat Loaf as Amiens and film star Raul Julia as Orlando.
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Rural Australia was the setting for Sydney’s Nimrod Theatre production in 1983 and an “aboriginal ‘second’ shadowed Charles in the wrestling match; ‘topsy-haired’ Audrey too was ‘part Negro or aboriginal or Islander.’ ”
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In Cheek by Jowl’s 1991 production the director, Declan Donnellan, claimed that the “all-male cast forces the audience to tread a tightrope of willed belief, a quintessentially theatrical act of faith.”
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City Limits
thought he used the actors “to polymorphously perverse and liberating effect: every tug of affection, in any direction, is unloosed to be played explicitly.”
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The production was well received, although not all critics found its exploration of sexual ambiguity liberating. The performance of the black actor Adrian Lester as Rosalind was subtly playful:
The extraordinary thing about Adrian Lester was that, with his beautiful voice and grace of movement, when he played the female Rosalind playing at being the male Ganymede he seemed more like a woman playing a man than a man playing a woman. And when he played at Rosalind playing Ganymede playing Rosalind, one simply gave up trying to work out in one’s mind whether one thought he was a woman playing a man playing a woman or a man playing a woman playing a man playing a woman.
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After her Oscar for
Shakespeare in Love
, in which she briefly played both Romeo and Juliet, Gwyneth Paltrow successfully took on Rosalind in Barry Edelstein’s 1999 production at the Williamstown Theater “as an ungainly youth in knickers and spectacles, his peaked cap worn backward on the head, like an aw-shucks version of Huckleberry Finn.”
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In Lucy Bailey’s 1999 promenade-type production at the Globe Theatre, some of the action was played in the yard among spectators who “needed streetwise skills to leap backward on a surface littered with discarded soda cans, as the wicked Duke’s followers
strong-armed them out of the way to make room for the wrestling match at ground level.”
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It was nevertheless “a friendly and satisfying production” in which the “one scary element” was Rosalind herself, “in an unusual and fascinating performance by Anastasia Hille, who apparently wanted to turn the play into something more complex, more female-oriented,” in a production that “otherwise took the title of the play as a key to its interpretation.”
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The opportunities that film offers for realism, including Orlando’s fight with the lion, were quickly recognized, and two early silent film versions were made by Kalem (1908) and Vitagraph (1912). Paul Czinner’s 1936 film, with the distinguished Austrian actress Elisabeth Bergner and featuring a young Laurence Olivier as Orlando, blended “realism and fantasy in odd and charming ways”
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to a score by William Walton. In her 1992 film, Christine Edzard “sought to evoke the spirit of Arden in a different place: the urban wasteland of London’s docksides.”
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Critics were divided: one argued that “the film can only be fully appreciated when assessed in its own avant-garde terms as a postmodern experiment attendant upon, and sensitive to, a
fin-de-siècle
moment,”
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while others regretted its “puritanical denial of visual pleasure.”
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Despite praising the non-theatrical doubling of Orlando and Oliver, Marshall concludes that “The disjunction between the Shakespearean language and the modern setting creates more strain than the rejection of pastoral convention.”
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Several stage versions have been recorded for television, including an adaptation of the 1946 Regent’s Park staging and the RSC’s 1953 version with Margaret Leighton and Laurence Harvey, as well as Michael Elliott’s 1961 production with Vanessa Redgrave. The BBC Shakespeare version directed by Basil Coleman was set at Glamis Castle in Scotland, but despite Helen Mirren’s “intelligent Rosalind,” the naturalistic scenery dominated the small screen.
“Well, this is the Forest of Arden”
Shakespeare’s fantasy is a device to put us off our guard so that when he makes one of his sudden dives into truth our unpreparedness
renders the unexpected vision all the more striking. In Shakespeare, reality and artifice are not two opposing modes but “sphere-born, harmonious sisters,” indispensable the one to the other.
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One of the major difficulties with
As You Like It
in performance seems to be the successful depiction of real feeling in an environment based on an artificial literary construct, the pastoral—melding naturalism with artificiality and making it believable.
In Michael Elliott’s 1961 production the designer created a complete environment for the actors to play in, focusing, like so many in the past, on the idea of Arden as a second Eden, an idealistic idyll:
[Richard] Negri’s set is a steep green breast of a hill; from its top a mighty tree soars up and out of sight; branches jut from it like elephant tusks, supporting flat palettes of leaves. For the first scene or two I found the steepness of the rake distracting … but soon the set began to reveal its remarkable possibilities. For scene changes, patterns could be projected on to the ground: the grille of an iron gate in a courtyard, the dappled pattern of sunlight through the leaves of the forest. Superb groupings could be formed without any blatant use of ‘levels’. And characters could converse lying flat on their backs—which (quite apart from its theatrical novelty) is precisely what one does in a forest glade. By the end of the evening I was in no doubt that, from Epping to the Schwarzwald, this was the knoll where I would pitch my ideal picnic. And what better definition could there be of Arden.
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Despite this, there were early indications that something darker was emerging from the subconscious forest world:
Most strikingly, the killing of the deer became a crucial symbolic set-piece which acted as a critique of naïve pastoralism and affected the characterisation of the court-in-exile. By staging the stalking of the prey, its killing amid bestial cries from
men momentarily turned to wolves, Mr Elliott gives point to Jaques’ wincing—and suggests a reason for his melancholy, the old nightmare of the horns.
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Thus Elliott brought into question the idea of man the “natural superior” and the masculine attributes on which a patriarchal social order is based.
The depiction of the hunting episode in this production was a precursor to an increased emphasis in the last half of the twentieth century on “elements of pain and violence”
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in the play. Not only has the duke’s court become a place of genuine tyranny, but the forest, too, has been seen as a place of foreboding rather than a pastoral idyll. In the RSC’s 1967 production, director David Jones
never once lets us forget the play’s reliance on the disruptive yet sustaining natural world … This Arden is black and cold; we first see the Duke and his compatriots shivering in sheep-coats, stamping upon the ground in order to forget the discomforts of exile. Jones makes a great deal of the deer-hunting scene which he transforms into a frightening ritual in which the men of Arden stain each other with blood.
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Nature proves as unforgiving as the court in winter and brings out man’s baser instincts. Away from society and Christian restraints, the men revert back to pagan behavior with a mock hunting initiation rite suggestive of manhood and fertility. Conversely, in Adrian Noble’s 1985 production the hunting scene heralded the sexual initiation of Celia:
Fiona Shaw’s Celia gained from the production’s clearest idea. The brief hunting episode (“What shall he have that killed the deer?”) that follows her line “And I’ll sleep” at the end of IV.i was interpreted as her dream. Jaques drew a bloodstained sheet across her as she slept, and the lords then pursued her around the stage as if she were the hunted deer. She had obviously had an erotic dream, a sexual awakening, and was
therefore especially receptive to Oliver on his arrival, a point reinforced by the little laugh of sexual shock at his reference to the snake from which Orlando had saved him.
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Ritual was also portrayed as a positive force for healing and communion in the 1980 production, which climaxed with “a pagan love-in and fertility-feast involving the cast as a whole.”
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It moved
from winter towards May Day (bringing a transformation of Farrah’s set from a fleece-lined box to a sunny glade carpeted with spring flowers); it, too, is rooted in folklore which pervades the stage at the garlanded finale under Corin’s hymen.
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And so with the stage adorned with colourful blossom and foliage a cart appears, pulled by the forest lords, chariot-style … Celia, Rosalind, dressed as girls again. All is resolved and all presumably live happily ever after, as in all fairy tales. To celebrate, the cast dance and sing. It’s a sort of fertility dance, rather like a Morris dance on the local village green, the audience clap to the beat and finally Rosalind delivers her epilogue to a sea of smiling, happy faces.
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