As You Like It (22 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
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Terry Hands production, 1980: ritual in the play “climaxed with a pagan love-in and fertility-feast involving the cast as a whole.”
Certain festivals and calendar dates were important to the Elizabethans—Midsummer, Harvest Home, Twelfth Night, New Year, and, of course, May Day. Terry Hands’ reference to these modified pagan rituals emphasized the elements of the play that bring about a heightened awareness of the relationship between man and nature. They also brought to mind how these festivals acted as a release-valve for human behavior, especially sexuality. Inhibition was freed for celebration—Rosalind can free herself from the social restraints, strictures, and expectations inflicted on women. Festive license, while seemingly transgressing social boundaries, served in reality to underscore the underlying expectations about appropriate behavior demanded in everyday life. At the end of the play the status quo is resumed, but with a sense of hope rather than oppression.
The psychological aspects of the play were given a less subtle treatment in Noble’s 1985 production, which reinterpreted the idea of the Elizabethan pastoral, transforming the “forest of Arden into a dream-crossed Jungian testing-ground where true selves are discovered”:
Arden is a state of mind, a psychic Garden of Eden which lies just behind the civilised courtly world. At court Duke Frederick is a malicious despot; he banishes his brother Duke Senior and then Rosalind from the kingdom. But the moment he steps through his reflection in the looking-glass he finds himself in Arden and it is the same actor (Joseph O’Conor) who plays both the dukes. The set, which consists of a large chamber, the mirror, a clock and a few chairs and tables, hardly changes except for the introduction of dust covers which are made, ingeniously, to billow and soar during a dream snow storm.
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Through the looking-glass, personalities were magically transformed, and what was described as the “lunar beauty”
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of the set offered possibilities for play and imagination:
Noble’s Arden was a dream-like version of the ducal court, with dustsheets covering the furniture … An enormous white silk cloth trailed behind the exiles as they arrived in Arden, obliterating the court furniture and providing ‘possibilities for transformation into a hiding-place, a wedding-canopy’ … Touchstone pulled it up about himself and Audrey to suggest bed clothes; she arranged it like a wedding dress; and when Rosalind encouraged Orlando to ‘woo me, woo me,’ she likewise fabricated a dress from the stage cloth … for Noble the set was meant to release the actors so that characters might be explored in new ways. Not only is Arden ‘a realm of imagination,’ but the production’s emphasis shifted increasingly from stage effects ‘towards making its characters’ inner lives more visible’.
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In 2000, Kaffe Fassett’s highly artificial set was based on tapestries created by Elizabethan women, depicting “wonderful forests with palm trees and lionesses, great big flowers and tiny little stags and a big caterpillar and two people in love.”
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Arden was not a literal forest, but one created from the imagination of Rosalind: “
As You Like It
demonstrates not only ‘the green world,’ but also the manner in which that green world exists in our consciousness, namely the timeless world of play.”
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Artificiality, music, and fun were the keynotes for the 1973 and 1977 productions, which pastiched and updated the pastoral form. In 1977 this took the form of Trevor Nunn’s eighteenth-century fantasy that included elements of baroque opera. The RSC main stage was adapted by designer John Napier “to look like a late 17th century stage, with rows of lines and flats leading back, as it were, to infinity”:
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A toy proscenium stands within the proscenium proper; its curtain rises not on Act 1, scene 1, but on a musical scena in the manner of Purcell.… Trevor Nunn, the director, takes every chance to introduce dancing or singing. They are dancing at the Bad Duke’s court before Celia and Rosalind draw aside for their initial confidences. At the end, Hymen descends
from heaven in a cloud and steals some of Rosalind’s best lines while Rosalind, who has presumably contrived his arrival with real and not pretend magic, gets married with the other country copulatives.
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Critical of the artificiality of this approach, John Peter commented: “There was poor old Shakespeare applying all his skill and sophistication to turning the rigid pastoral form into warm human drama; and here comes Trevor Nunn and turns it back into elaborate artifice.”
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In Buzz Goodbody’s 1973 production, metallic “tubular trees replaced the ‘melancholy boughs’ of more conventional settings.”
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As one critic described the effect of Christopher Morley’s design, its “pattern of dangling metal pipes for the forest background suggests that someone has disemboweled the Albert Hall organ above the stage.”
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Many reviewers accused the production of never aiming
at even remotely credible behaviour among evolved human beings; for her the whole silly fable is an opportunity for three hours of high and low comedy … [Goodbody] offers us a rock-and-roll setting by Guy Woolfenden of ‘It was a lover’ sung by two small boys with a tea-chest skiffle base. (‘Same to you’, says one of them when Touchstone bids ‘God mend your voices’.) Derek Smith essays Touchstone as a music hall comic in distant descent from Max Miller … After the final joining of all the copulatives, rock-and-roll breaks out again in a dancing epithalamium; streamers are thrown … towards the audience, and a rain of coloured paper hearts falls from the ceiling.
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Despite its superficially bright and bouncy façade the production did not shirk at portraying the underlying threat of violence:
Frederick’s court had “the touchy atmosphere of Hitler’s bunker,” and while Duke Senior by contrast ruled over a place “pretty cosy for a forest camp, with armchairs and the best wineglasses” … this Duke reached for a gun when he spoke of hunting, not a picturesque bow and arrow.
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Bringing references of political tyranny up-to-date,
John Caird’s … production in 1989 alluded to the recent collapse of communist regimes in Eastern Europe, showing Duke Frederick’s court as a monument of oppressive totalitarian architecture, which had to be painfully dismantled by the dissident exiles to reveal the forest floor below. This production also literalized the Forest of Arden’s “winter and rough weather,” showing the refugees making their escape through blizzards. Even in Arden they wore heavy greatcoats and huddled together for warmth, which somewhat hampered the expressiveness of their gestures and movement.
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The naturalness, the unforced understanding of her playing, the passionate, breathless conviction of it, the depth of feeling and the breadth of reality—this is not acting at all, but living, being, loving … If the word enchantment has any meaning, it is here.
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This was how Bernard Levin described Vanessa Redgrave’s landmark performance as Rosalind. He was echoed by a plethora of male critics who were equally beguiled by her rendition of the character:
Her performance is a triumph. For the first few scenes it looked as if she was going to seem gawky in the part, but I suspect she intended it. Her Rosalind, very properly is mewed up in court clothes. As soon as she gets into the forest she expands, throws her arms wide to the air, and frolics up and down Negri’s hill like one of shepherd Corin’s long-legged lambs. Between the leaps she pants out Rosalind’s euphuistic conceits with all the excitement of someone who has just found that she too can play the game of fashionable wit. In every way the forest of Arden is a place of discovery for her.
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4.
Vanessa Redgrave’s landmark performance as Rosalind in 1961: “Arden is a place of discovery for her.”
Most male critics failed to mention how Redgrave’s performance forced the audience to recognize that
[Rosalind] is also a character thrown on her own resources when exiled by an authoritarian state. It seems entirely appropriate that Redgrave, between the Stratford season and the
London revival, became a political activist, for what she was demonstrating on the Stratford stage was literally “actresses’ liberation.”
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In Arden, expressions of love and the flouting of gender stereotypes become political statement, an active reaction against the tyrannical court and the strictures of society. As in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, the forest acts as a place of catharsis, of self-discovery where lessons can be learned and hopefully taken back into society.
In Trevor Nunn’s 1977 production Rosalind and Orlando were, in part, drawn together by their desire to lead a different type of life than the one offered to them:
Peter McEnery’s ravaged Orlando in a West Country accent [adopted as a sign of his neglected education] is far from the orthodox mooning lover, and seems at times to be desperately trying to break out of the conventions that surround him, and Kate Nelligan’s bursting and exuberant Rosalind—all darting hands and flying ringlets—has precisely the kind of humanity that these conventions try and control. What the play says finally is that humanity, love and simplicity must triumph over corruption.
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Similarly, in David Thacker’s 1992 production,
Samantha Bond’s Rosalind and Peter de Jersey’s Orlando set themselves up interestingly against convention. Both of them have to fight to keep their hold upon life. De Jersey’s Orlando, no cool hero he, is almost at the end of his emotional tether in the hostile court; Miss Bond’s precarious Rosalind, threatened with banishment, is overwhelmed rather than comforted by Phyllida Hancock’s bland Celia.
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The friendship between Celia and Rosalind is central to the dynamic of the play. In Adrian Noble’s 1985 modern-dress production, Juliet Stevenson (Rosalind) and Fiona Shaw (Celia) explained how,
To liberate Shakespeare’s women from the confines of literary and theatrical tradition requires an analysis of the nature and effects of those social structures which define and contain them—the opening of this play sees Rosalind and Celia already contained within a structure that is oppressive and patriarchal, namely the court of Duke Frederick, Celia’s father. The modern dress decision served to remind us that such structures are by no means “ancient history,” and that the freedom and self-definition that the two girls are seeking remain prevalent needs for many of their contemporaries today.
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In some recent productions Celia’s role has been given added poignancy with the suggestion that she, too, is in love with Orlando. In Terry Hands’ 1980 production Sinead Cusack as Celia did “much to bring an unrewarding part to life by suggesting that she too fancies Orlando, is jealous of, if good humouredly resigned to his preference for Rosalind, and doesn’t altogether relish her role as gooseberry at their flirtations.”
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In Dominic Cooke’s 2005 production,
Amanda Harris, in a brilliantly detailed performance, turns Celia into a myopic closet romantic, who equally fancies Orlando but lacks her cousin’s emotional audacity. Their relationship wittily becomes a microcosm of the play’s fascination with antithetical, yet linked, worlds.
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Unlike Celia, Rosalind is given a unique opportunity, the freedom to behave as she wishes when she dons a male identity. Juliet Stevenson’s Rosalind in 1985
delightedly shuffles off her limiting female apparel to prove a manipulative, teasing and sexually curious young woman—and it would be interesting to think that this is, in part, a play about how we are defined by gender—certainly Stevenson’s performance substantiates this idea.
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The difficulty with having a woman play Rosalind is that we can never quite believe that Orlando is fooled by the deception. Most
actresses maintain such a large element of their femininity, or resort to exaggerated male swaggering, that it wouldn’t fool anyone. There is a suspension of belief required that doesn’t quite bring about the frisson which it would have done in Shakespeare’s day, when all female roles were played by men. Stevenson’s performance, although not widely applauded, did bring out a sense of equality between Rosalind and Orlando, by being convincing as Ganymede:
The one really successful feature of this messy production was the masterly partnership of Juliet Stevenson and Hilton McRae as Rosalind and Orlando. For once, the two parts were equally matched. They were the same kind of people, warm, direct, impulsive: Orlando attacked Oliver at one moment yet hugged him generously the next; Rosalind vehemently assured Duke Frederick that she and her father were not traitors. With her contemporary unisex hairstyle and white suit, Miss Stevenson was equally convincing as boy and girl. Her baggy trousers followed the latest fashion but also suggested that she was in part a clown: she used a bowler hat and cane like a cabaret artiste to illustrate the “divers paces” of Time. She transformed this directorial gambit by her own grace and timing, and because she so securely communicated the crucial point that it is through mockery and deception that Rosalind expresses her love. At “I can live no longer by thinking,” Orlando momentarily glimpsed, through eyes dimmed with tears, the features of Rosalind, not just Ganymede, reflected in the water as she looked over his shoulder; and when he subsequently cried passionately “Why blame you me to love you?” he caught exactly both the game and the underlying emotional intensity. In the mock marriage, their mutual declarations “I take thee, Rosalind … I do take thee, Orlando” were heartfelt and gave the impression of an equal relationship.
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