As You Like It (review)
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- As You Like It
Exhausted by a journey from Istanbul the day before, I chose to purchase seats for Shea Tharrock’s As You Like It in the middle gallery at Shakespeare’s Globe. In the past, I have enjoyed productions at this venue from the pit. Once the domain of the “penny stinkards,” the standing-room-only pit still offers good value for money (tickets are approximately $12). Moreover, one often gets the sense of being, quite literally amidst the action, as directors often creatively embrace the possibilities of this unique space by sending costumed actors out into the crowd before the play or integrating the use of the space into the action of the drama itself. [End Page 140]
At $40 a seat in the middle gallery, I was surprised how little one gets for the money. The seat is a wooden bench with no backrest. There is no barrier between one’s neighbors to the left and right, nor can one do much to avoid knees thrust into one’s back from behind, or thrusting one’s knees into the back of the person in front, on these too-closely-crowded benches. Having purchased less comfortable seats only in ancient amphitheatres, which have the excuse of millennia of wear and tear, I began to wonder whether the architects of the new Globe were more interested in recreating the trials and tribulations of the early modern theatre patron or pursuing a more pressing, and modern, profit motive.
On the day of the production, the cramped seats filled quickly. Shortly before the matinee began, a young couple came in with an elderly lady. The couple politely squeezed by en route to their seats, but in the crowded space, the elderly lady tripped as a man inadvertently leaned back, and I had to catch her as she fell into me. Looking embarrassed and unhappy, she sat down beside me without a word.
If this was the reality of the day, the magic of Shakespeare’s Arden and the mastery of Sharrock’s direction quickly took hold. As a study in audience response, this was truly amazing to see. The actors, some of whom I shall discuss further, hit their cues seamlessly, and it seemed that the whole of the theatre was perfectly in tune, catching the witticisms and laughing out loud at Shakespeare’s festive humor. By the fourth act, my unhappy neighbor, the elderly lady, was leaning against my shoulder as she anticipated the twists and turns in the narrative, and I was leaning against hers. The crowded space of the playhouse had ceased to be a source of annoyance and become a site of communal experience.
Particularly notable about this production was the way Sharrock, with the help of Tim McMullan’s Jacques and Dominic Rowan’s Touchstone, offered new insight into a curious element of the play, the resistant strain of melancholy in the festive world—which Shakespeare perpetuates in spite of the play’s resolution when Jaques chooses to remain an exile in Arden forest. I have always been of the opinion that Jaques’s melancholy was gently scourged and discouraged in the play. Rosalind and Touchstone mock him for his choices, and Duke Senior reveals Jacques to be akin to Malvolio in Twelfth Night or, to a lesser extent, Angelo in Measure for Measure: a hypocrite who relishes chastising the sins that he, himself, has committed. Jacques’s refusal to return to court and civilization has always been a mystery to me, but...
