As You Like It (review)

The photograph on the cover of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s program for artistic director Michael Boyd’s 2009 As You Like It must have been shot well in advance of rehearsals. Depicting a diminutive Rosalind wearing a tightly tailored pin-stripe suit amidst a sea of green leaves, it bears little relationship to the production, which presented a bleak Arden with a strangely inconsequential romance, stripped of all erotic charge, at its center. Not interested, it seemed, in finding a modern equivalent for the erotics that we assume to have been important to the play in performance on the Elizabethan stage, Boyd located the play’s driving interest and shaping energy elsewhere, primarily in a deliciously nasty Touchstone and a uniquely sympathetic Jaques. In them, it found some compensation for its dull romance—though Boyd admittedly had to play with the text, and in one crucial instance, alter it, in order to gain with Touchstone and Jaques what he lost with Rosalind and Orlando.

Principally, the production witnesses Boyd’s taste for violence, for it presents the ostensibly “golden world” of Arden as rife with it. The most explicit violence of the production comes immediately after the interval, in a bit of stage business invariably mentioned in the reviews of the mainstream press. As the audience re-entered to take its seats, it found Geoffrey Freshwater as Corin seated at a butcher’s block skinning a rabbit. (Yes, a real rabbit. PETA representatives must have been fully occupied elsewhere.) With every performance, a poor dead rabbit lost its skin, to be held up as a spectacle for humans. And what a spectacle it was, for a rabbit sans skin is not only a most delicate thing, it is also not unlike a human. At one of the two performances I saw, the audience was so taken with the manual skill exercised to produce this spectacle it clapped. It was then stunned into silence when the rabbit descended to the butcher’s block to have its head lopped off.

Gratuitous violence? Undoubtedly. It was interesting, nevertheless, especially as Freshwater-Corin’s matter-of-fact butchery was set in contrast to the activities of Richard Katz’s Touchstone, who was just a few feet away, trying to catch his fellow’s attention, first by whistling and mumbling, and then by tumbling about in a ball of haywire. Blurring the “theatrical” and the “real” to put the actors into competition for our attention, the action functioned as an intriguing non-verbal prelude to Touchstone and Corin’s exchange about the relative values of court and country: Katz-Touchstone, it seemed, had to prove Freshwater-Corin “damned” before he walked away not only because Corin, by preparing food for others, was doing work that mattered, but also because Freshwater-Corin had gotten the applause that Katz-Touchstone so obviously desired.

While the production was dotted with small bits of business that made something of various hints of violence in the text, it pursued with a special keenness the subtle ways in which the play suggests the violence that women may experience as a result of their sex. It captured this best, perhaps, in Sophie Russell’s Audrey, who, made over by Touchstone to suit his taste (even as he himself was gaining increasing freedom of movement in the strait jacket he wore in Arden), appeared in the final act dressed in the shortest of white skirts and the highest of white heels. Tottering about like a deer on spindly legs, Audrey bore a...