Peter Viney's Blog

As You Like It
by William Shakespeare

Directed by Federay Holmes & Elle While
Designed by Ellen Parry

Shakespeare’s Globe
Sunday May 6th 2018, 13.00

CAST

Presented by
The Globe Ensemble:

Catrin Aaron  – Phebe / Corin / Duke senior’s 2nd lord
Yarit Dor – Fight Director
James Garnon – Audrey / Duke Senior’s first lord
Federay Holmes – Director
Colin Hurley – Touchstone
Bettrys Jones – Orlando
Richard Katz – Charles the Wrestler / Silvius / Duke Frederick’s Second lord
Jack Laskey – Rosalind
James Maloney – Composer
Nadia Nadarajah – Celia
Ellan Parry – Designer
Pearce Quigley – Jaques
Shubham Saraf – Oliver / Duke Frederick’s first lord
Helen Schlesinger – Duke Senior / Duke Frederick / Sir Oliver Martext
Michelle Terry – Adam / William / Jacques de Bouys
Elle While – Director
Siân Williams – Choreographer
Tanika Yearwood – Amiens / Le Beau / Hymen

I searched the Globe website for news of “press night.” I guessed it was 9th May, when both plays (Hamlet and As You Like It) are being done on the same day. I was reluctant to post before that and held this back. Ours was a full price performance and not listed as a preview. Press Night was 17th May for a production that started on 25th April (Hamlet) or 2nd May (As You Like It). By the time we saw it, they were on the 6th performance. Virtually a month of shows before “Press night” is what Benedict Cumberbatch’s “Hamlet” was lampooned for. It seems unusually hyper-sensitive. You take the full-price for tickets, then you take the acclaim, or the stick, whichever. They needed to fix a great deal. Hopefully they did.  Some, like poor voice projection from half the cast, may have been worked on. The ragbag costume could easily be improved. However, they couldn’t fix the fundamental issue: re-distributing most of the major roles, and abandoning gender-blindness (gender balance would be fine).

This is the first production at The Globe with Michelle Terry as Artistic Director. Her first radical move is to form and make concrete what used to exist (but without the name) … The Globe Ensemble. They are using exactly the same team for Hamlet and As You Like It too. Exactly means just that, not (as normally) plus “a couple of additions in lead roles.” So Michelle Terry plays Hamlet, but sticks around to do Adam and ensemble parts in this one including a sheep. It’s only three years since The Globe last did As You Like It, with Michelle Terry playing Rosalind that time, and James Garnon playing Jacques (who is playing Audrey this time).

I have copied the “cast list”  as on The Globe website which innovates by combining the cast and the creatives in a single integrated list. A criticism of the Emma Rice regime was the loss of that “ensemble” feel of regulars, and it’s pleasing to see stalwarts of the company like Pearce Quigley and James Garnon back. The two plays, Hamlet and As You Like It,  are combined in repertory because both date from 1599, the year The Globe was built. There are even two show days to enable the audience to draw parallels between the plays … it would have been good if that had been clear on the original booking form, though booking The Globe for “Friends” in 2018 was a website crashing total mess. The Globe has thankfully announced a much-needed new ticketing system. It was so far the worst of the majors during the last two years.

On the other hand, As You like It is a confusing enough play on gender switching to start with, and they have decided to have Orlando, Duke Frederick / Duke Senior, Corin,  Lord Amiens and Adam played by women, and Rosalind and Audrey played by men. The story is that having assembled the cast, they turned up for rehearsals and chose which parts to play among them for the two plays. Really? I think the gender switch must be a pre-decision. Then did the younger actors in support roles have the chance to say, ‘Hang on, let me play Hamlet instead of the boss.’ Then everyone gets a voice in the programme to discuss the play. Michelle Terry is listed as “actor” not as artistic director.

I’m not bothered about gender switches in supporting roles, but switching Rosalind and Orlando? Is this a step too far for gender-blind casting? I really loathe it when directors assume “everyone knows the play so I can mess around with it.” No, they don’t. Most people know just a few plays well – ones they had to study usually. As You Like It is an oddity, as I’ve noted before. I could write a synopsis of most Shakespeare plays from memory, but the plot of As You Like It is one I’d have to think about, despite having seen it at least half a dozen times in a decade. It’s intrinsically confusing. So clarify, don’t confuse further. On the plus side, the programme synopsis is clear.

Unusual: a completely unadorned Globe stage. Back to basics.

We go in to find a bare stage. No props except later a single stool. No adornment. Yes, I railed against the Globe stage being sheeted in plastic for Imogen, and I’ll come back to the 2016-2017 Emma Rice regime later, but Dominic Dromgoole’s era as artistic director was never this bare. There were Roman bits added to the balcony, or the brothels in the pit for Measure for Measure, extra thrust stage, steps. No this is right back to the bare bones of the theatre. We take our seats and look up. The speakers have gone (though I could see intact connectors). However, there seemed to me to be a new row of lights above. Are they going to light the audience in the evenings? Shared light was a major issue in the Emma Rice debate.

Where have all the speakers gone?

Shakespeare’s company could find the odd boughs of trees to decorate or create a moving forest in Macbeth. They certainly had props. Check Henslowe’s Diary. They owned a rock, a cage and a Hell’s Mouth, plus a couple of “tombs” and, for Dr Faustus, “a dragon.” This totally bare stage seems an extreme OTT  reaction to the Emma Rice years. Peter Brook had this to say about As You Like It, comparing it to a simple stage which he advocated for A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

As You Like It has no lyrical magic; and the problem is simple. Against a background of beauty and cunning design, the play will be more joyous. Against a background such as a reconstructed Elizabethan stage that to modern eyes is featureless and austere this happy play might seem a little sad … Visconti showed what is to my mind the right approach to this play … he wanted to give to the play all he could of fantasy and theatrical magic.
Peter Brook, intro to the Folio Society edition, 1953, revised 1965

Amen. Compare it to the utterly magical RSC 2013 production.

The beginning is woeful. We have a tiny tiny Orlando … my companion is 5 foot tall. This one seems considerably shorter, though choosing wide short trousers and a boxy top deliberately accentuated it. We have a tiny … and female playing a male … Orlando who lacks projection. Her (or here, “his”) USP is being very short so looking funny against a very tall “Rosalind”and Charles the Wrestler. Can we call that a size-ist joke?  Then on come “Rosalind” and “Celia” with vast rear bustles under their skirts as the two ugly sisters from your local panto.  Rosalind is Jack Laskey. A man. OK, but then Celia (Nadia Nadarajah) is deaf and communicates with sign language.

Nadia Nadarajah as Celia, flanked by Richard Katz and James Garnon as lords.

As Michelle Terry should recall from the Globe 2015 production where she was a superb Rosalind (also on a bare and un-magical stage), one of the female interaction high spots in the whole of Shakespeare is Rosalind and Celia. Celia is a major role with a lot of lines. I think of Rosalind / Celia as a marvellous pairing: Pippa Nixon and Joanna Horton at the RSC, Michelle Terry and Ella Piercy at The Globe, Rosalie Craig and Patsy Ferran at the National. But here Celia can’t speak. This leaves Jack Laskey as Rosalind endlessly signing (he is working extremely hard too throughout the play as a result), then every one else has to sign.  Yes, Nadia Nadarajah is an exquisite presence, is charming and gets laughs with her impassioned signing (though she fixes a toothy smile far too much). The Globe did Love’s Labour’s Lost in 2012 with Deafinitely Theatre in which Nadia Nadarajah played the Princess of France. That was advertised as for both the deaf and hearing worlds. She is breaking new ground here as part of a “standard” production, but it leaves huge silent gaps in the dialogue, destroys all rhythm in the scenes and leaves everyone waving their arms about:

Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand thus, but use all gently …
Hamlet’s advice to the Player King, Hamlet Act 3, Scene 2

But everyone ever after sawed the air far too much and too dramatically because they were signing.

Jack Laskey as Rosalind (dressed as Ganymede), Nadia Nadarajah (as Celia)

This is a well-intentioned but disastrous idea. The Globe is very good with signed and captioned performances anyway. OK, do a signed version. Yes, deaf people are far too invisible in society. Find a clear theatrical role, find a prominent one, but not such a major interactive chatty, speaking role. I can see that it will work in Hamlet because Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (her role)’s lines are pretty much interchangeable. I could see her as an effective Ophelia too. I’ll add that when she did vocalise, in shock, it was instantly moving.  But Celia is  all about her girlish dialogue with Rosalind. It’s not just Celia’s part that suffers, it leaves Rosalind in a ridiculous position with no one to bounce off. I checked. There are fewer than 25,000 people in the UK who use sign language, or 0.04% of the population. On the other hand, it is estimated that 17% of the population have some degree of hearing loss. So clear projection from all the actors and volume would surely be more important than the inclusiveness demonstrated by having just one actor signing? Was that a positive reason for Emma Rice’s reviled speakers and tiny mics? Most theatres now attach mics to actors to boost volume, even far smaller indoor ones. I moaned about the use of recorded music rather than live in some Rice era productions, but actors do need to be heard. Some have the projection which The Globe requires (old-fashioned training perhaps). Others here manifestly have not. Mic boosting nowadays can be so subtle no one notices. Pity about losing the speakers, then.

Bettrys Jones as Orlando; Jack Laskey as Rosalind

However the gender-blindness is my main gripe. Michelle Terry is aiming for 50 / 50 gender representation across the season by ignoring the words on the page. I can see this as a credible and laudable aim at the National or Royal Court, when you are commissioning new work and choosing across the entire history of theatre. But this is Shakespeare’s Globe. It was not written like that. You can certainly switch some roles from male to female, as has been done for years. But that’s gender balance, not gender blindness. You can’t (or shouldn’t be able to) bulldoze a personal agenda onto the material. One who did with real life was Chairman Mao. I taught a group of high-level translators from Beijing in the early 1970s, just six or seven years after the Cultural Revolution. They had tried to eliminate gender … same clothes, same haircuts, same shoes. It did not work. It never will.

I had decided at this point that we could only follow the plot on the toilet door sign basis. A skirt? Supposed to be female. No skirt? Supposed to be male whatever the gender of the actor. But it only worked so far. When Phebe appeared, she (and she was a she) was wearing trousers.  I had long decided that this production was contemptuous of an audience struggling to follow the story  … “everyone already knows the story, so let’s play with it.” Though in this case it translated to me as “let’s piss on it.”

When Rosalind dispenses with (her / his / its / their)  tired panto “look no tits” joke and becomes dressed as the boy Ganymede we are supposed to know because (her / his / its / their / who cares) shirts and cardies have roses embroidered on them. But we also know because (she/ he / it / they)  has the signing Celia dragging along with him. Weird because they decide on Celia’s male name for pretending to be guys for safety  in the forest, but she retains a skirt and is then called “my sister.” Though she’s a cousin. We were confused. Forget that, it applies to the whole production, “we were confused.”

They decided to intercut the court and forest at speed, what with having no set change (not even a solitary tree), with Duke Frederick and Duke Senior and their lords doing rapid onstage switches of coats. Both the fraternal dukes are played vigorously by Helen Schlesinger,who comes on with welcome audience-directed intensity and suddenly we have appropriate volume,  though we heard someone say, “Oh, it’s Jennifer Saunders!” I could be persuaded on appearance and voice and her energetic audience interaction (most unusual in this production) that it actually WAS Jennifer Saunders. She was very good (most unusual in this production).

Shall we go on?  This is the first unfunny Phoebe I’ve seen. It’s a gem of a role, too. Dull, here, but the fact we couldn’t tell where Corin ended and Phoebe started (same actor) didn’t help.

James Garnon as Audrey

Touchstone? OK, funny enough. Clowns should be overdone. The klaxon “honk honk” was funny the first five or six times. James Garnon as Audrey had a good banana joke, but for an actor of his massive talent, playing the ugliest ugly sister would be better done in panto at Blackpool. Comic Relief red noses on clowns have been a cliché for five years. Seen far too many.

I thought Oliver was strong. Well, clearly audible. We checked the cast list for the parallel Hamlet. He’s playing Ophelia.

Pearce Quigley got away with Jaques, because Jacques stands outside the play and Quigley’s laconic style with asides works in clown roles.  He shares “best actor in the play” with Helen Schlesinger, but he benefits because his is essentially a solo piece, so is not mired by what was around him. His velvet ‘poet’s’ suit places him in a different time era too. First rate Seven Ages of Man speech.

I struggle for other plus points apart from Jacques and The Dukes … OK, the wrestling scene looked directed and “active” for a change and we got the full very short (Orlando) /very tall (Charles) joke as far as it could be stretched and it WAS very funny in the fight. They got that just right … back to Peter Brook:

In the second scene, Shakespeare notes “a fight”. Shaw would have given two pages of detailed instructions: Shakespeare did not need to do so, because he knew that in his playhouse his stunt men would not let the crowd down. A producer, however loyal to Shakespeare, who does not see to it that the wrestling is terrific betrays his author.
Peter Brook

The wrestler (Charles Katz) did fire-eating before the fight. Most impressive and exactly what Peter Brook was talking about.

Then it was done with for me. They had six baa-ing sheep on their knees… funny. Seen it before.  Most recently at the National Theatre production. Always works. The killing of the deer to song was very good.  Oh, and at the end, Hymen was lifted singing into the roof which looked great, hang on, that’s what Emma Rice did with large singers at the end.

Costumes? Charity shop / rummage stall was a principle. The programme boasts about it. Wear what you like, choose it yourself, mix modern and the wardrobe built up over years at the Globe. Make some stuff especially. The result? Abysmal. Total mess.

Musical score? Make up a song as you go.

Emma Rice was accused of disrespect for the Globe, and of destroying the fabric of the Globe theatre with speakers and lights, and of destroying the concept with recorded beats / rock / pop music and so on. OK, but this Michelle Terry regime, on the evidence of one play, are keeping the building as a holy shrine, but destroying the essence of the Shakespeare play itself.  This was As You Like It stripped of all romance, stripped of all Arcadian magic, stripped of all the lines of a major character, stripped largely of humour, the great roles totally screwed around with by gender switching.  It needs the switch from court to forest where anything might happen, and the pastoral folk feel on equal footing with these courtly crew. It didn’t have any of that sense of transition or magic. It failed. The Forest of Arden is Warwickshire. It’s Spring. Has anyone ever looked out over the lush green hills of Warwickshire? (TheRSC Restaurant is an ideal viewpoint). It failed to capture any of that rural magic. Dismally, so.

In the end, it was the worst version of this play I have seen. It’s also the worst production at The Globe I have seen. Even the poor Romeo & Juliet last year at least had more ENERGY .

The programme notes by Will “what a load of” Tosh explains that:

It culminates with the image of two male hands joined in marriage: a queer union, closing Shakespeare’s queerest comedy.

But no, that didn’t come out at all either. It wasn’t two male hands; it was a man dressed as a woman and a woman dressed as a man. If there was supposed to be some sort of imposed gay or trans-gender agenda, it didn’t work. Men dressed up in drag (badly) as women could be a Rugby Club “smoker” or your local Widow Twanky (an amateur role I’ve done myself). Women taking major male lead roles end up looking like the all girls grammar school sixth form play. That was the level of cross-dressing. I don’t see the gay connection at all. That certainly can come across in an all-male production, as it did brilliantly in the Orsino / Cesario dialogue in the Globe authentic practices Twelfth Night half a dozen years ago. But it didn’t here.

Think of recent Globe artistic directors. Emma Rice is a hugely talented director. So is Dominic Dromgoole. Both keep proving it post-Globe too.  The move from a director as leader to an actor as leader is not looking good. Michelle Terry has complained about “director-centric theatre” and says she wants to “dismantle hierarchies”.   She has expressed belief in the democracy of actors working it all out in ensemble.

On the evidence of As You like It, that’s a brave try, but in practice here it’s a disaster, and this looks like a play with no director, though two cyphers are listed.  A theatre without directors? It sounds cosily democratic on paper. Driverless cars sound great on paper too. Then they crash. Actors left to themselves in Terry’s “democratic and egalitarian spaces” seem to think we want to watch them in bizarre casting choices, keeping fairly still, delivering lines devoid of everything a director adds. Democracy in a small company of actors works up to around four or five co-creators (Not The Nine O’Clock News. Monty Python etc). It does NOT work with a complex classic play. That’s why a director directs.

Let me be blunt. Michelle Terry starred in Christopher Luscombe’s Love’s Labour’s Lost /Love’s Labour’s Won for the RSC. She gave an incredibly good performance. It finished. They revived it later, but she was unavailable, so they replaced her with Lisa Dillon. We saw both versions. It was equally brilliant. It was the director’s concept. There are so many excellent actors. Michelle Terry, good as she is, was replaceable by Lisa Dillon. Mr Luscombe and his concept and his interaction with other professionals on design, costume, lights, sound was not replaceable. As a scriptwriter, therefore part of “the production team” I know the amount of detailed interaction a director has with all the other professionals before actors get near it. Actors are very rarely privy to that. I’m sorry to think Michelle Terry places so little value on all that work that goes on before the actors get to strut their stuff.

So what is the artistic director of a major theatre doing crawling round as a sheep and doing minor bit parts moderately well? One imagines there are more important tasks to be done.

I realize that the integrated list of participants is actually designed to eliminate or undermine the normal ‘director first, then designer, then music’ listing. Not that anyone can claim to have ‘designed’ anything in this, nor to be ‘costume designer.’ There wasn’t any of either.

We went in in a positive frame of mind. We’d read about the ensemble work. It had sounded good to us. They did get a lot of applause at the end. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon. Hot, too. Everyone appreciates the actors’ physical effort and hard work. It’s the Globe. The very ground has magic. Applaud Sam Wanamaker’s vision.  But to sum it up, this production was a misguided failure. We thought the cast looked embarrassed. They should be.

I know many regulars were angered by the Emma Rice regime, and many stopped being Globe  ‘Friends’ . However, even the harsher critics warmed to her innate theatricality in the end. We went from being anti to being wary to being fans and the positive was that the audience profile became dramatically younger. But I know how some old regulars felt … for me it was dispensing with live musicians that rankled most. If this is how dull, “director-free” and perversely agenda-ridden the Michelle Terry regime is going to be, we will not be renewing membership. I can instantly list half a dozen directors who do Shakespeare era very well and in interesting ways. So why are the Globe management making such odd choices? Didn’t they ask Emma Rice what she was going to do? Didn’t they guess? Have they asked Michelle Terry? I fear they have jumped out of the frying pan into the fire this time.

Compare the Watermill Theatre’s current A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Link to review). That manages 50 / 50 male and female casting, though it is not gender-blind. Instead, it switches some parts to female. The Watermill includes a deaf actor. It has the feel of a tight ensemble … and most importantly it has strong direction, design and costume design. It gets everything right that this production gets so wrong.

Right. And in Hamlet we see that Horatio, Hamlet and Laertes will be played by women, and Ophelia by a man. Oh, dear.

Stars? Just the one.

*

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

Did it get better over the extended “rehearsal in front of full price paying punters” period? I’ve never been this far off the critical consensus in any other review. I’m puzzled.

Time Out was interesting. On May 17th it gives a 3 star review, but four Time Out “users” reviews are united on 1 star each. Same for Hamlet – 3 stars from the critic. but 1 each from two “users.” Note that the Users group saw them a week earlier, around the time we did. They make the same points too. Trip Advisor’s comments were also united on a single star. Not only did we think it dire, but a woman next to us it said it was the worst Globe production she had ever seen, and a couple at our hotel found it ‘deeply disappointing.’ So this appeared to be the consensus one week in. Here they’re nearly three weeks in.  I see “3s” and “4s” accompanied by negative comments which do not normally greet a “4 star” play. There are a few “As You Like It – 4, Hamlet – 2” reviews which smack of sugaring the pill. Then you go to the Globe Twitter Feed and sorry, this is information control. “The best Hamlet I’ve ever seen” gets repeated. Not what any critic said!

4 stars
Paul Taylor, Independent ****
Ann Treneman, The Times ****
Natasha Tripney, The Stage ****
Will Longman, London Theatre Co UK ****
Scott Matthewman, The Reviews Hub ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****

You notice some slightly unsettling things. The freshness of the interactions means that the use of the stage space is often bizarre. People get stranded near the pillars; the blocking is peculiar. The designs veer all over the place, from a puppet deer apparently made of bandages to Hymen in a tatty giant wedding dress.

3 stars
Michael Billington, The Guardian ***

I never got a strong sense of the play’s shift from court to country or of its transition from winter to spring. It remains, like the Hamlet, a perfectly decent production and a welcome relief from the work of the previous Globe regime, which seemed to assume that the plays were a bit boring unless jazzed up. … The Globe ensemble is a worthwhile experiment but I’m not convinced it provides a pattern for the future. The brute fact is that Shakespeare’s plays benefit from star performers and the inspirational vision of a first-rate director.

Marianka Swain, Broadway World ***

Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph ***

Terry’s predecessor Emma Rice – a martyr to the cause of innovationat this Bankside bastion of the replica olde-worlde – departed after two tempestuous years, bringing an end to the lighting rigs and sound systems that had made the place resemble an off-shoot of Glastonbury festival. Those who don’t regard Shakespeare as the precursor to Jean Michel Jarre may be happier bunnies but there’s a snag: Hamlet and As You Like It are veritable orgies of egalitarianism …
… Yes, the Eurovision levels of gender-bending are pushed to breaking-point. Call me old-fashioned but I’d have rather seen Laskey as Orlando, Jones as Celia, Terry (underused in the comedy) as Rosalind and maybe Nadarajah as part of a double-act with Touchstone (a klaxon-honking Colin Hurley).

Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ***

I’m not sure as sprawling a play as this is the perfect candidate for the direction-lite, actor-heavy experiment that is this company.

But Time Out users (all * star) say much what I’ve said:

Andrew W: What we got mostly was the pantomimic absurdity of a tall man in a dress fancying a short woman in trousers. The gender blindness here somehow managed to drain the play of much of its suggestiveness. Gender-switching is fine, but you should have a reason for doing it *
Julian B: unlike Hamlet, As You Like It lends itself to pantomime, and this production seems little more than that. *
Michael W:  It’s possibly the worst Shakespeare I have ever seen. It has to be pulled. You cannot expect people to pay to see this. It’s completely incomprehensible – people standing around spouting lines without any idea of what they are doing or why. One paced, no atmosphere, no sense of place, generalised acting with no connection to reality. It’s a mess and shows exactly why you need a director. *
Peter M: Sadly this bears out exactly why plays needs directors and not direction by cast committee.  No creative energy, no focused ideas, no creative arc. Shakespeare at its worst! *

Sarah Hemming, Financial Times ***

A firmer directorial hand might have yielded more light, shade and intent.

2 star

Christopher Hart, Sunday Times **

Yet for a play that’s already quite a confusing farce of mistaken identities and cross-dressing, the casting only adds to the confusion, the story slowing to a dull plod as it gets bogged down in a swampy morass of gender fluids. For anyone coming to As You Like It for the first time (as many do at The Globe) there’s a high risk of bafflement and boredom.

Henry Hitchings, Evening Standard **

This is an interpretation that conveys little of the play’s rustic charm. Lacking magic and a sense of love’s combustible and transformative power, it’s also, more problematically, short on humour, with Pearce Quigley’s Jaques the one drily melancholic outlier.

LINKS ONTHIS BLOG

AS YOU LIKE IT
As You Like It RSC 2013
As You Like It, Globe 2015
As You Like It, National Theatre, 2015
As You Like It, RSC 2019

MICHELLE TERRY
Midsummer Night’s Dream – Globe 2013
As You Like It, Globe 2015
Love’s Labour’s Lost– RSC
Love’s Labour’s Won RSC

JAMES GARNON
The Winter’s Tale, Wanamaker (Autolycus)
As You Like It – Globe (Jacques)
‘Tis Pity She’s A Whore – Wanamaker (Bergetto, Cardinal)
Duchess of Malfi– Wanamaker (Cardinal)
Much Ado About Nothing – Old Vic (Don Pedro)
Richard III – Globe / Apollo (Duchess of York / Richmond)
Pericles – Wanamaker (Pericles)
Richard III – Almeida 2016 (Hastings)

PEARCE QUIGLEY
A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Globe 2013
The Changeling Wanamaker Playhouse, 2015
The Beaux Stratagem, National Theatre, 2015

BETTRYS JONES
Life of Galileo, Young Vic 2017

COLIN HURLEY
Farinelli & The King, Wanamaker Playhouse 2015

RICHARD KATZ
Richard II, Globe 2015
Nell Gwynn, Globe 2015

HELEN SCHLESINGER
Albion – Almeida 2017