As You Like It
1992: Christine Edzard

This is an independent English production — not part of any series or festival. It is a modern adaptation, in visual terms, though it adheres to Shakespeare’s text — at least as much of it as it preserves. The setting for the court is some anonymous high-fashion social setting, while the Forest of Arden is in fact a torn-down concrete urban desert, with a few blockhouse-like buildings, the undersides of highways, and the like.

In general, the transposition is neither particularly insightful or particularly clever; as a representation of what Shakespeare scholars call “The Green World” it seems almost perversely inverted. It’s visually rather wearying and tedious, to my taste. That being said, the performances are credible, and the delivery animated. If there is one person who is more important than all the rest for this play, it is Rosalind. She here is impassioned and entertaining; I can’t say that she brings any special insight to the role, but it’s adequate. Her (presumably contemporary) cousin Celia is played with verve by Celia Bannerman, but she was nearing fifty when the part was filmed, and it shows. She doesn’t quite convince one as the ingenue. The actress who plays the food-truck version of Audrey here will be known to some modern viewers as Professor Sprout from the Harry Potter movies.

This is not an especially easy disc to find, and probably not really worth going very far out of your way to get unless you are a completist collector: it is available only in Region 2 format, and hence one needs to have either a Region 2 player or a region-free player to handle it. Overall, it’s not going to give one as reliable a sense of the play as many of the others.

Buy As You LIke It from Amazon. Note that this is available only in Playback Region 2 — not in American Region 1 format.