East London Shakespeare Festival’s zany, family-oriented rendering of Shakespeare’s comedy brings the pep and charm, even if it sacrifices some of the play’s potential nuance.
As far as accessible and outdoorsy Early Modern comedies go, As You Like It is a pretty intuitive candidate. A split setting between town and woods allows East London Shakespeare Festival to make clever use of not only their parkland surroundings, but also the facade of Clissold House in Stoke Newington – a building whose period brickwork and Victorian austerity all but meld into the show’s own set-pieces.
The plot is straight-down-the-line Shakespearean comedy: in Arden Town, the Old Duke has been supplanted by his scheming brother, leaving his daughter Rosalind in a precarious position. Her close friendship with the New Duke’s own daughter Celia has protected her thus far, but the welcome is wearing thin. After a romance blooms between Rosalind and Orlando – the disinherited and oppressed younger brother of New Duke-sycophant Oliver – she is banished from Arden, as is Orlando. With the devoted Celia in tow, Rosalind adopts a male alter-ego named Ganymede to affect her escape into the Forest of Arden. Love is un- and re-requited; wires are crossed; disguises are donned and unveiled; and in the end all is put to rights in a giddy flurry of matrimony. As You Like It doesn’t have the elegance of structure that Shakespeare’s other gender-bending comedy Twelfth Night retains, nor the ethereal lyricism of Midsummer – but there’s always plenty of rich poetry and clever wordplay to be found.
Any company embarking upon a summery, family-friendly Shakespeare-in-the-park comes in with a very specific mandate, and quite genuinely the best thing to be said about ELSF’s As You Like It is that the team absolutely understands the brief. The edit of the text (presumably by director Rosie Ward) is brisk and judicious; intuitive and inventive design by Lucy Fowler achieves the playful vibrancy it needs to; and the cast pile-on the audience interaction, winking anachronisms and goofy ad-libs (hats-off to the immortal exit-line “Look at that, duckie! It’s an AMEX!”). These latter few are the most consistently sharply-tuned tools in ELSF’s belt, along with the dramaturgical quips they mine from the text’s modernisation: Rosalind swanning into an exclusive club while paparazzi swarm and Gaga blares is a grand introduction to their own Arden Town. It’s clear the team are having a blast with this part of the process, and that ebullience becomes the infectious engine that drives the early sections in particular. It’s bright and breezy, and the cast are adept at drawing both the kids and adults into their playful world.
The cast have energy to burn, and bless them they leave it all out on the pitch. They’re fairly-well impossible not to find endearing. Fights by Meg Matthews are just as silly and deftly-conceived as they ought to be – particularly the early wrestling match between Orlando and ‘Charles the Wrestler’, which the team delightfully render as a WWE-adjacent spectacle. The music is hit-and-miss: when the cast have a chance to perform live with their own instruments it settles beautifully, but they feel a little marooned in the larger karaoke mash-up numbers.
The real hitch in the endeavour is that – with an unrelenting, comic-sans intensity as their guiding principle – ELSF risks smothering the play they’re there to perform. A lot of the time, Ward and her cast don’t seem to know when to play a moment straight – to let the text and the scenarios do some of the work for them. It’s as though they’re nervous that if they don’t swing for the fences with vaudevillian extremity when the opportunity arises, their audience might lose interest entirely. But the upshot of this is that the story and intention can get buried under whizz-bang gags and fortissimo scenery-chewing. The scene in which Rosalind (as Ganymede) and Orlando role-play his hypothetical wooing of Rosalind was a sometime-victim of this – losing a little of its sweet romanticism and the sly transgressiveness of its gender-bending; Emilia Harrild and Luke Martin absolutely have the chops to play this scene with clarity and earnestness, but they don’t quite get the chance. Melancholy Jaques’s oft-cited ‘Seven Ages of Man’ monologue definitely suffers from this malady. It’s an especially perilous ensnarement for an edit of this brevity, as later scenes and B-plots occasionally burst onto the stage and promptly vanish without appearing to make much sense at all.None of this is shooting for a revelatory take on As You Like It, but it’s not meant to! ELSF are out here to have a good time, and they’ve got the charm and energy to do it – even if they don’t always marry their pantomime vim with the depth of authentic feeling that Shakespeare’s poetry tends to offer. But if you’re looking for a picnic and a family night out, it delivers the sugary goods.