As You Like It, and: The Tempest (review)

As they had in 2009, the plays of The Bridge Project, again directed by Sam Mendes, opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, As You Like It in January and The Tempest in February 2010. (A review by Steve Mentz of the two productions in Brooklyn appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of Shakespeare Bulletin). They then traveled to Hong Kong, Singapore, Paris, Madrid, and Amsterdam, arriving finally in London at the end of June. Both plays opened in London on the same day, As You Like It in the afternoon and The Tempest in the evening, perhaps to insure they received equal attention from the critics (The Tempest had been more widely reviewed in New York), or perhaps to make more apparent a link Sam Mendes had found between the two plays. As he explained in a note to the program, he had in his research come upon a passage by Ted Hughes in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being: it is "as if the Devil's Island where Prospero now finds himself were what remained of the Forest of Arden after the holocaust of the tragedies." "The plays this year," Mendes thus proposed, "are designed and conceived as a single gesture, a single journey." In performance, however, each play, as he admitted, stood "on its own," and, if they in any way created a single gesture, a single journey, it was only through the somber and melancholy tone they shared.

The opening scenes of As You Like It were played on a darkened stage. The struggle between Oliver and Orlando was more violent than usual, and, although Oliver seemed in his subsequent soliloquy to have genuine reservations about his treatment of Orlando, he had earlier bribed Charles with some folded bills to "break his neck." Orlando was visibly sad as he prepared for the wrestling match, a sadness from which he never seemed to recover, even after his marriage to Rosalind. (In a post-performance discussion Christian Camargo said that, even after some six months as Orlando, he had still not fully understood how to play him). Charles and Orlando wrestled in darkness, their shadows projected menacingly on the back wall by means of a lamp swinging on a chain laterally across the stage. In the first scene after the interval, when he was interrogated by Duke Frederick, Oliver's head was twice submerged in a basin of water, and he was left alone, with a burlap sack on his head, to find his way off the stage. Rosalind alone brightened the dark court with her vibrant energy, playfully jostling Celia as they spoke to Orlando, eagerly jumping onto the stage at "he calls us back," and later rushing toward Duke Frederick and grabbing at him when he banished her...