As You Like It (25 page)

MB:
Strangely enough, we let Katy’s hair down for Ganymede. We also threw away the court collar and corset and gave her a small moustache, which made her look like a cross between Antonio Banderas and Katharine Hepburn. Dharmesh Patel wore a wig of even longer hair as Amiens, to afford us a currency of young men with long hair.

And, more profoundly, did your Rosalind become more herself when she was Ganymede?

DC:
I don’t really know what this question means. I think the play is partly dealing with how authentic you can be as a person, and what does authenticity mean? Do human beings have a core to them, a moral center, or is life a series of different acts played out, a performance? I don’t think the play comes down on one side or the other. What is undoubtedly true is that by performing and being artificial she discovers the authenticity of Orlando’s feelings. Her disguise allows her to explore Orlando’s feelings for her in safe parameters.

MB:
Katy came to rehearsals very confident of her ability to inhabit a young pugnacious male, and it came as a shock to us all to discover that Rosalind was at her most profoundly feminine as Ganymede.

Entered into as a self-protective act of male impersonation, Ganymede becomes a powerful and disturbing disinhibitor that reveals and transforms Rosalind more profoundly than any forest could. Dreams and demons which were inexpressible for a courtly woman of the time come tumbling out to anticipate centuries of gender struggle, striking us as astonishingly contemporary and scaring the pants off both Celia and Orlando.

Is Orlando worthy of Rosalind? Linguistically and psychologically, hers does seem to be the stronger part
.

DC:
I read James Shapiro’s book
1599
while I was in rehearsal, and that was a big influence on me. His argument is that Orlando knows from the word go that Ganymede is Rosalind in disguise. I felt that this would make the playing of the Orlando/Rosalind scenes rather arch and overcomplicated. But I was struck by the idea that Orlando knows that Ganymede is Rosalind as he goes into the final scene. I think there is textual justification for this. Also, if Orlando starts the final scene unaware that Ganymede is in fact Rosalind, he’s both very much behind Rosalind and behind the audience, and therefore never her equal. For me it was important that he was her equal, otherwise her choice is brought into question by an audience, in a way that makes the play unsatisfying. It feels like a bad match that couldn’t possibly survive. Our eventual supposition—and like all Shakespeare interpretations, it is open to question—was that, in the “bloody handkerchief” scene, when Oliver picks up Ganymede after she’s fainted, he discovers through physical contact with her that she’s a woman. I think this is supported by the text: he calls her “Rosalind” at the end of the scene, for example, rather than “Ganymede.” We speculated that between this scene and the scene where Orlando tells Rosalind that he “can live no longer by thinking,” Oliver has told Orlando what he’s discovered. This seems justified by Orlando’s complete change of mood in relation to Ganymede—he’s had enough of
the mind games. However, he has learned that role-play, improvisation, and an element of performance are a crucial part of keeping a relationship alive; it’s not all about pinning poems on trees. A successful marriage is built on each partner agreeing to improvise together, to play a variety of roles with conviction, to have flexibility. This is what he has learned from Rosalind, and in our production it became clear through the way he played along when she said “I have, since I was three year old, conversed with a magician.” Therefore, he was a knowing participant in this conspiracy rather than a dupe. This completed Rosalind and Orlando’s journey together. He has learned his lesson and they are now ready to go into marriage together as equals. I was really pleased with this aspect of the production, because I thought it did solve one of the problems of the play, of “Well, why is she marrying that guy, he’s so naive?”

MB:
She should be so lucky. Phoebe is not the only woman in
As You Like It
who is “not for all markets.” The disgraced daughter of a defeated duke, spirited and wanton, and far too intelligent for the average male ego, Rosalind will almost certainly have to look abroad and probably trade down for a husband. In Orlando she has found a man whom she desires on sight, who shares her moral strength, and who surpasses her in potency and sense of wonder. His name is an anagram not just of his father’s but of the great Roland of chivalric legend. His lyric verses are imperfect, but that’s a manly failing. He has the open heart, the wit, and the playfulness to spar as an equal with Rosalind on fire as Ganymede. It is true that the action which ultimately makes him more than worthy of Rosalind takes place offstage: it is Orlando’s love, courage, and physical strength when faced with the lion and Oliver that turns the fortunes of the play and even mystically disarms the troops of Frederick. Orlando in the theater depends heavily on his Oliver to return the favor as he recounts the tale of Orlando’s Christ-like sacrifice of his own blood to cleanse the sins of the world.

How do you see the balance in the relationship between Rosalind and Celia?

DC:
We made a decision very early on that Celia is the more naive of the two when it comes to the opposite sex. We went down the line that she was a very learned, slightly swotty, bookish girl, who preferred the company of other girls and hadn’t discovered boys yet. This played well because it allowed Celia’s deflating responses to Rosalind to be based on her lack of experience in love. She is not really interested in boys until she meets Oliver, where everything changes. Tellingly, from that point in the play she’s silent. It’s as if she’s now been bitten by the romantic bug and has nothing more to say. There’s a major shift in the relationship between Rosalind and Celia when Rosalind falls in love with Orlando, and as the love between Rosalind and Orlando deepens, life becomes quite fraught and painful for Celia. She feels excluded. She’s given up everything for Rosalind—her home, her family—and now it feels like Rosalind’s abandoned her. But she’s also intrigued by the strange transformation her friend is undergoing. Celia’s story is about letting go of Rosalind and, on some psychic level, making space for Oliver.

7.
Michael Boyd production, 2009: Orlando as a match for Rosalind, “He has the open heart, the wit, and the playfulness to spar as an equal with Rosalind.”

MB:
Celia is the daughter of the younger brother and talks of being too young to appreciate Rosalind at the time of Frederick’s coup. So
she’s probably younger that Rosalind, even though her voice at court is older and more pragmatic; the voice of authority and merry competence compared with Rosalind’s hesitant and volatile start.

I enjoyed the youth and frailty of Mariah Gale in our production, which is repressed at court and covered with a determined optimism, then revealed as hopelessly out of its depth in the forest as Katy’s older Rosalind sings and bleeds as an adult woman on fire with desire. Celia is brittle but in charge of her father’s court, and, after a delightful burst of bossy grand-dame behavior, has to sit quietly and learn from Rosalind how to be ready for love when it strikes in the shape of Oliver.

In what ways was Touchstone a touchstone in your production?

DC:
In the first half of the play in the court I think he is, because he’s saying the unsayable, speaking the truth in a world where the truth is dangerous. He’s someone that Rosalind and Celia can trust to tell them the truth. Within the court world he does what Jaques does within Duke Senior’s court, which is to provide the minor notes, undercutting the myths of power that are being propagated. Once Touchstone’s let loose in the country, however, his story becomes much more about his pursuit of Audrey, his physical drives.

MB:
He was Celia’s prickly touchstone at court, licensed to offend her with stinging reminders of the injustice and hypocrisy of her father’s court, even after being silenced by her father, the duke.

He became the audience’s antiheroic touchstone in the forest, allowed to moan at discomfort, selfishly make the most of it with Audrey, and long for home.

At the end of the play Hymen asserts that the audience’s “wonder may diminish,” yet, with the highest marriage count of any Shakespearean comedy, the play’s neat conclusion can still appear implausible. How did you set about making each coupling believable for the audience?

DC:
Each of the romantic stories that leads toward those weddings has a specific and detailed journey, each with very clear turning
points. It felt crucial to reveal the detail of those journeys in performance, so that when everything comes together at the end it feels natural rather than contrived. To help this we made the Hymen section of the final scene ritualistic. Hymen’s entrance, with Hymen played by Corin, was a quite formal ritual that, in our minds, Rosalind had cooked up. This gave the ending a kind of magic and stopped it from feeling like a playwright trying to tie things up and make them neat. Equally, each of the marriage blessings is different—there’s texture there, so that when you look closely at what’s happening, Shakespeare isn’t creating a happy-ever-after ending for the play. It’s far more nuanced.

There’s always an element of magic at the end of Shakespeare’s comedies. He isn’t writing naturalistically. Frequently, he’s referring to the ritual of theater in a knowing way. There are many references to the theater and role-play in
As You Like It
. For example, you have a girl playing a boy—and of course in the Jacobean theater it would have been a boy playing a girl playing a boy, so you get that double level of irony and theatricality. Because plays were performed in the open air, and therefore without the division between audience and performers that there is in a contemporary theater, the audience were constantly reminded that they were watching a performance. So events that might read as contrived or artificial in performances are joyously theatrical. None of the plays are documentaries; they’re dealing with archetypes, a distillation of human experience. The gesture of the plays is always mythic, so to do them completely realistically is wrong, I think. There is a difference between being truthful and being realistic, and that distinction is crucial to an understanding of how to perform Shakespeare’s plays.

MB:
It is Rosalind’s vivid and moving account of Oliver and Celia’s incontinent dash to the altar that sells it to us as the most natural and enviable thing in the world. In our case we had a real young couple in love offstage (who were also excellent in their understudy roles as Orlando and Rosalind), which made Katy Stephen’s job even easier. Forbes Masson as Jaques implied bitterly that Oliver was marrying power and money, but the audience didn’t believe him.

The entire audience is meant to fall instantly in love with William,
and did in our production with Dyfan Dwyfor, but Sophie Russell’s surreal Audrey and Richard Katz’s Dada Touchstone were clearly meant for each other, and will quite possibly prove Jaques’ prediction of a short-lived marriage wrong.

Jimmy Tucker’s Act 5 breakthrough as Silvius was to move from plaintive pastoral minor key to full-on physical passion the moment that Ganymede was revealed as a woman. He did a Benedick on Phoebe and literally stopped her mouth, earning her eleventh-hour conversion with physical masterfulness.

I don’t for one moment buy the idea that Orlando rumbles Rosalind before the wedding, and he does have a lot to reassess on the instant of Rosalind’s self-revelation, but his is the most unconditional male love in Shakespeare, and in any case it’s clear to him that he has passed any covert test set for him by Rosalind disguised as that pretty youth.

Naomi Frederick
, born in 1976, has worked onstage and in film and television. Trained at RADA, she has played Celia in
As You Like It
for the RSC, where she also appeared in John Fletcher’s sequel to
The Taming of the Shrew, The Tamer Tamed
. She was Isabella in Com-plicite’s
Measure for Measure
that played at the National Theatre in London, where she was also Lady Percy (Hotspur’s wife) in the two parts of
Henry IV
. She talks here about playing Rosalind in the summer of 2009 in Thea Sharrock’s production of
As You Like It
on the stage of the reconstructed open-air Elizabethan theater in London, Shakespeare’s Globe.

What was your first encounter with the play?

As You Like It
was the first Shakespeare I ever saw. I was twelve, and it was a production done by the sixth form at the school I was going to, and I was taken along specially. I fell in love with Celia and Rosalind instantly. I remember thinking initially that Celia was the main part
(I think that happens for a lot of people—it appears to be Celia’s play at the start) and I wanted to be her.