As You Like It
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, no great Shakespeare fan, claimed sardonically that children would enjoy the virtue and philosophy in As You like It while adults would be delighted by the pageantry and wrestling.

Kimberley Sykes’s production, opening the new RSC season, certainly delighted an audience determined to enjoy something in these gloomy Brexit days.

Anchoring the show around the much-quoted line “All the world’s a stage,” she sets the play seemingly backstage with the action resembling a rehearsal session for an upcoming pantomime. The main prop is a costume rack from which the cast members appear to have made their own choices.

Everything is played for laughs, leaving the central relationship between Lucy Phelps’s Rosalind and David Ajao’s Orlando floating uneasily in their love game which never convinces us or, apparently, either of them.

Phelps employs touches of manic hysteria while Ajao is a jolly lad who enjoys a jokey relationship with the audience as much as any emotional attachment to his androgynous partner.
 
This directorial lack of coherence is mirrored in Sophie Stanton’s Jaques, no melancholic philosopher here but a dungareed character who wanders around projecting a uninterested boredom, while Sandy Grierson’s Glaswegian Touchstone, dressed like some ageing rock star, head-butts his lines with aggressive enthusiasm.
 
The appearance from the flies of a monstrous puppet of Hymen, god of marriage, to bless the happy couple appears to be occasioned more by the use of the theatre’s technical resources than by the Bard’s stage directions.
 
There is no shortage of energy here. But Shakespeare’s comedy, however much it is as the box office may like it, has much more to offer than knockabout fun.
 
Runs until August 31, box office: rsc.org.