As You Like It
2018: Kimberley Sykes

This is yet another modern-dress production from the Royal Shakespeare Company that seems to prize vulgarity and incoherence as much as anything else. It isn’t overtly crude for the most part; it’s just tacky through and through, and simply inane in terms of its plotting. If this is what “making Shakespeare relevant to a modern audience” means, it’s time to acknowledge that the project isn’t going to work. All you will get out of it is an indictment of the society to which it is being adapted — a culture controlled by attention deficit, incapable of distinguishing sense from nonsense, and unwilling to accept anything other than what is couched in the currently fashionable social and political norms.

At first it seems as if there is a deliberate irony at work here: things are generally inverted from any rational expectation. The transition between the first part of the play (at the court) and the second (in Arden) is accomplished via a noisy and coyly self-aware onstage shuffling of props and costumes, with a few announcements over the PA system, belaboring the obvious: "Miss (or Ms.: I couldn’t tell) Stanton to the stage, please. Miss Stanton to the stage, thank you...[delay]...Miss Stanton to the stage immediately, please. All the world’s a stage. All the world is a stage, thank you". The smug self-admiration is breathtaking.

The court world is represented by a green carpet much like a lawn. The move to Arden — conventionally the “Green World” — is signified (of course) by removing all trace of green, and rendering the forest (that’s what they call it — it could as well be the interior of a sheet metal shop) with plates of blue-black metal. But if this is really ironic, it’s such self-absorbed and heavy-handed irony that it crushes what it’s being applied to, and it functions no longer as irony, but simple exhibitionism and belligerent contrariness. It’s hard to identify any point, other than perhaps, “We hate Shakespeare, and invite you to do so too. Isn’t it fun?”

Gender fluidity is apparently also a requirement for all plays at the RSC now, and I suppose even questioning that is an invitation to being pilloried in social media (if nothing else), but here it is taken to such an extreme that the whole narrative of the play collapses beneath it. Some of it is indifferent; some is important. Jacques is played by a woman. Of course...it’s a man’s part. On the whole, she does a pretty good job of it, though, and the change of sex doesn’t radically impede of the play. Exactly why it needs to be done this way is another question, though, and I can’t help thinking it’s something we’re not supposed to ask.

More importantly for the larger unfolding of the plot, Silvius is turned into Silvia, and hence her wooing of Phoebe is pressing a case for a same-sex relationship — certainly not what Shakespeare had in mind. The point that Phoebe is a heterosexual woman is not an incidental feature that can be ignored, but is essential the plot. Phoebe is enamored of Rosalind when she thinks Rosalind (as Ganymede) is a man. When Ganymede is revealed to be Rosalind, Phoebe loses interest and forthwith renounces any claim to her. Why then would she want Silvia? Apparently the rationale of the plot, already loaded by Shakespeare with meaningful and intelligible gender-bending moves, needs to be sacrificed to the purpose of virtue-signaling a progressive openness to same-sex marriage. In unfolding this travesty, Rosalind/Ganymede’s coyly repeated “And I for no woman” has to be deformed into “And I for no Phoebe”, which is really buying her nothing she didn’t already have, since she never claimed to want Phoebe. Ganymede/Rosalind’s point was to get Phoebe to realize that she didn’t want Ganymede. Now Phoebe’s not supposed to want Ganymede because he’s actually a woman, so she will flee for consolation to the arms of...another woman. Huh? Did anyone follow this plot? Were they sober? This simple incoherence is no longer in the domain of irony. It’s just stupid.

Sir Oliver Martext (the vicar) is no longer a man but a woman, dressed as a bishop. Even if one is somehow invested in the idea that since women can serve as clergy now in the Church of England, and might be bishops as well, we should reverse-engineer history to push that case, there is no way in which a vicar — who is specifically and precisely a representative of the bishop, should go about as a bishop. (That women were not clergy in sixteenth-century England does not need to be elaborated, I think.) But no matter. None of it means anything anyway. Any kind of designation of a person, place, or thing that is or should be meaningful in Shakespeare’s world is a mere signifier to be mocked, denigrated, and dismissed with a joke. But it’s not even a good joke. The trick with comedy is that when every detail is funny, none of it’s funny. In the long run this is just a romp through a nihilistic landscape where nothing means anything. Previous generations have come to understand that the retreat to the Green World — here, Arden — is in a sense an exploration of the self, and a way of discovering the truth. Not here, though: the production celebrates the negation of, and the apparent indifference to, truth. There is nothing to find about oneself here. Even hoping to find it is worthy of ridicule.

This is as true for the characters individually as for the audience, many of whom don’t seem to appreciate the scope of desolation in which they’ve been engaged. Rosalind, surely one of Shakespeare’s most entertaining characters, is here full of animation, and yet (at least to my taste) almost completely uninteresting. She seems frantic but passionless. She is supercharged with energy, but her actual feelings (if she has any beyond the declamation of the moment) are permanently obscure, because other than a primal lust for Orlando, she has no real motivation for anything. Virtually all her lines are whined or barked out aggressively, until the only impression I have of her is not “joyous and witty” but “overbearing and lacking all self-awareness”. One fears that if she ever shut up, the audience might have occasion to detect and react to her vacuity, and the vacuity of the whole production.

There is abundant stage business that has no apparent relation to the play other than to afford conspicuous distraction. Touchstone scatters glitter over the audience; he prances around in screaming yellow plaid pants doing now an imitation of Elvis Presley, and then of some rock guitarist, and making himself considerably more unpleasant than what Shakespeare wrote. “Breaking the fourth wall” can have its place in drama, of course, but never have I seen it used for less reason and to less effect.

There is a lot of talent on display here, but it’s squandered. The production has been praised wildly in a number of reviews (though not all) as joyous. I can’t find the joy here myself. It’s a bleak and hopeless view of what we can expect of the death of meaning. Nothing in it or about it means anything. Accordingly, nothing matters. If you are not willing to embrace that nihilistic worldview, you will probably find this production depressingly incoherent, stridently preachy, and ultimately empty. The reviewers who seem to like it best are also those who claim not to like Shakespeare very much, or to find his plays tedious or difficult. There is an essential correlation there, I think. Performing and appreciating Shakespeare takes a certain amount of work and thought. If you’re not willing to do that, find something else to do — a short-attention video game where people’s heads explode from thinking coherently might be more to your liking. It’s not clear why anyone wants to claim to be doing Shakespeare if, in order to do so, it has to be completely remade into something else. I usually try to find something redeeming about even those productions I don’t particularly like. I did so here, too, but came up empty. This is a silly, tasteless, and insulting performance, all the worse because it is so self-importantly absorbed in its own vapid righteousness.

Buy As You Like It from Amazon.