Patrick Carnegy

Jesting in earnest

As You Like It; The Winter’s Tale<br /> Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

issue 09 May 2009

As You Like It; The Winter’s Tale
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Back in the rehearsal room for the first time since his triumphant Histories cycle, the RSC’s artistic director Michael Boyd whisks As You Like It far away from the Forest of Arden. Not a tree in sight, and does anyone give a twig? Yes, the play’s in part a satire on the Elizabethans’ taste for awful pastoral verse, but Boyd wisely sets it on a clinically bare stage, asking us to respond firstly to its Mozartean games on the universal joys and terrible deceptions of human passion. The courtly costumes (puritanical black with white ruffs) could be 17th-century Dutch, while in the ‘forest’ pretty well anything goes.

Katy Stephens is the feisty, mustachioed Rosalind-as-Ganymede, striding the stage like a musketeer. Her rubicund weathered face (stark contrast with her cousin Celia’s peach-blossom cheeks) suggests she may have wasted too much time skinning rabbits (yes, real ones) with Geoffrey Freshwater’s shepherd.

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