I doubt whether directors will ever run out of reasons for a new approach
to Shakespeare. In the current Midsummer
Night’s Dream we have a programme note on mirror-imagery.
Now Clifford Williams, who has directed As
You Like It for the National Theatre at the Old Vic, writes about dreams and
modern semblances, going on to a last paragraph which really must be quoted:
“The examination of the infinite beauty of Man in love—which lies at
the very heart of As You Like It—takes
place in an atmosphere of spiritual purity which transcends sensuality in the
search for poetic sexuality. It is
for this reason that I employ a male cast; so that we shall not—entranced by
the surface reality—miss the interior truth.”
Quite. One can hear a
conversation as the Old Vic audience moves into the autumn drizzle of Waterloo
Road. “Did you get the interior
truth?”—“Indeed, yes. What a
relief it is not to be entranced by a surface reality!
We cross here. Mind that car.” A
few people, guilty creatures sitting at a play, may remember enjoying another
experiment, a performance of As You Like
It with actresses; but that was long ago.
It must be more intelligent to accept Celia as somebody who looks like an
actor in a miniskirt and tortoiseshell spectacles, even though one is too
distracted by her aspect to notice what she is saying.
Mr. William denies that he is demonstrating the specific ideas in
Professor Jan Kott’s essay, “Bitter Arcadia,” which is also cited for this
collector’s piece of a programme. Even
so, Kott, can prophesy, is going to cause a lot more trouble in Shakespeare
production before somebody else arrives to displace him.
It seems to me that somebody at the National must have said, some time
ago, “Better have another Shakespeare, daresay, Now what can we do with As
You Like It?” One answer
would have been: “Do it as
excitingly as possible. The
National has the resources and the cast. No,
there must be something different, and the present production is the result.
The pity of it all is that this is frequently a competent revival, with
two performances that are more than just competent:
the sour Jaques as Robert Stephens, who speaks the Seven Ages more
potently than I have heard it, and the Touchstone of Derek Jacobi.
Before this summer Touchstone, as a rule, had me despairing: then Stratford offered Roy Kinnear’s shaking fool and now
Mr. Jacobi flicks cheerfully through the part as a mercurial young man who
happens to have dropped into Arden from the Carnaby Street end of Soho.
The idea, as we say now, works good:
there is nothing wrong with Jeremy Brett’s Orlando or the Duke
Frederick of Frank Wylie, a dangerous neurotic who must have given to the old
religious man a tough task in conversation.
--From Illus. London Times, 10/14/
Anthony Hopkins' lady, sardonic and sharp and much more given to using feminine
gesture and deportment as a means of comment.
Richard Kay’s Phoebe, on the other hand, veered much further in the
direction of female impersonation, and begat in me the only stirrings of
uneasiness felt during the performance; all
the same, I was much more aware of Phoebe as an intelligent and frustrated girl
than I have ever been before. Anthony
Hopkins’ bumpkin Audrey was, reasonably enough, straight out of the music-hall
and pantomime tradition, and very funny too.
All in all, the play, it seems to me, gained nothing by the device; but
much light was thrown upon the possibilities of women’s acting.
All this would have been very heavy going had not the performance as a
whole achieved a delightful buoyancy. I
don’t understand why, in Ralph Koltai’s perspex sets, psychedelically lit
with swirling blobs of color, the action needed to take place somewhere in outer
space; but at least a sort of shimmer was imparted which did not positively
lower the spirits—as did Timothy O’Brien’s threatening timber in this
year’s unhappy Royal Shakespeare production.
Robert Stephens perhaps dwelt too lovingly upon his white-suited, donnish
Jacques, a skillful though unfeeling study of disillusion—less fruitful in the
spectator’s mind than Paul Chapman’s top-hatted raven in the Birmingham
Repertory production which came to London during the summer.
But other supporting roles gave immense pleasure—first, Derek
Jacobi’s Touchstone, the funniest I have ever seen, the essence of small-scale
city knowingness; his scene with the aged Corin, marvelously warm and human in
the unfailing hands of Gerald James, epitomized absolutely the conflict between
the earthy and the urban which was not to become vital for another 250 years
after the play was written. Roderick
Horn’s Amiens, too, sang with exactly the right weight of ability—neither an
embarrassing quaver nor an overtrained sweep, out of place and out of character;
and if Marc Wilkinson’s post-Beatle songs are records I can see no reason why
they should not get into the Top Ten. Lilting
and catchy, they stand happily at the point where in today’s idiom pop music
and real music have once again blended to please all tastes.
Drama, Winter 1967