'As You Like It' review — a raucously entertaining take on this surpassingly sweet comedy

Read our review of As You Like It, co-directed by Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine, now in performances at Shakespeare's Globe to 25 October.

Summary

• As You Like It is playing at Shakespeare's Globe
• Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine co-direct a wonderfully entertaining production
• Lola Shalam is a fiercely determined Rosalind
• Peter Bourke is a touching Adam and Thomas Josling an unusually likeable Oliver

A rollicking summer at Shakespeare’s Globe continues with this raucously entertaining take on As You Like It, a surpassingly sweet play that seems here to take its cue from a passing reference near the end to “rustic revelry”.

Co-directed by Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine, the latter of whom also appears as an especially gormless Orlando, the production shifts styles and period specificity without ever losing focus on the need to ensnare an audience by any means possible – and if that means leading them in a “hey nonny no” singalong or throwing in the odd ad lib along the way, so be it. (Katherine Pearce’s commendably casual Jacques at one point remarks “we never met” to one of the numerous lovers that make up the four couplings whose commingling ends the play.)

The start suggests high-aristo hijinks, as if an elaborately wigged and costumed company are about to embark upon The Marriage of Figaro: another defining piece, come to think of it, about the cross-currents of love. But once the plot sends its characters into the Forest of Arden, their disguises the stuff of self-revelation, we come to inhabit altogether funkier, more free-wheeling climes that can accommodate both an 11th-hour appearance as Hymen by the wonderful singer-songwriter Katie Richardson and a gasp-inducing backflip from Jonnie Broadbent’s show-devouring, as often as not barely clothed, Touchstone. Richardson, the play’s composer, lends a folk-inflected larkiness to the ebullient climax.

No other Shakespeare comedy unites so many and disparate an assemblage of folks who to a person all see the light in time to share in love’s plenitude. Whereas Much Ado contains a putative death and Midsummer Night’s Dream seems suffused from the start with parental rage, As You Like It makes good on its title, delivering the audience into a pastoral idyll here visualised by a back wall of blank canvases that gets sketched in to stunning effect as the play continues: Arden’s coming into bloom accords with the passions it enfolds, and the sparseness is surely of a piece with a “forest” that is in fact several times referred to as a “desert”. (Paul Wills’s design shimmers in its simplicity.)

The shepherd Silvius pays obeisance to “the wounds that love’s sharp arrows make”, and As You Like It surpasses even Twelfth Night in making gender confusion a significant milestone in the sometimes pained courtship between Josephine’s wide-eyed, gawky Orlando and the rabid, feisty Rosalind of Lola Shalam. A onetime Juliet at this address, Shalam may not be “more than common tall”, as is indicated of Rosalind in the text. But that scarcely matters next to her Rottweiler-like determination, this duke’s daughter barking commandments of love at all and sundry, at one point fainting at the possibility of snaring some of that love for herself.

I’ve seen more wistful accounts of this play and certainly more moving ones, but it’s hard not to get caught up in the pell-mell energy that can agreeably accommodate Phoebe Naughton’s Audrey, a wench here born to work a room; Peter Bourke’s infinitely touching (and well-spoken) old Adam; and Thomas Josling as an unusually likeable Oliver, Adam’s master, whose behavioural about-face remains one of the most startling in all drama. (A shoutout, too, to the clarion-voiced Jordan Rhys as the late-arriving Jaques de Boys, an important stop on the story's route from riven families to wholesale restoration.)

In so deeply empathic a play, it’s surprising that not more is made of the deeply platonic love on view between Rosalind and her beloved “coz” Celia, who are jointly redefined as Ganymede and Aliena as the contortions of the plot work themselves out. You don’t get much sense here of Gracie Oddie-James’s comically inclined Celia feeling displaced by Rosalind’s newfound affections elsewhere – Celia’s plaintive “and I’ll sleep” here doesn’t count for much – but perhaps that, too, is of a piece with a production that has scant time for rest and wants instead to release the audience into a late-summer landscape of mischief and mirth.

As You Like It is at Shakespeare's Globe to 25 October. Book As You Like It tickets on LondonTheatre.co.uk

Photo credit: As You Like It (Photos by Marc Brenner)