As You Like It (review)

After her successful stage production of The 39 Steps, still running in London and New York, Maria Aitken was invited by Michael Kahn to stage As You Like It for the Shakespeare Theatre’s 2009–10 Season. Alfred Hitchcock’s The 39 Steps (1935) is a holiday tradition in Britain, on the order of It’s a Wonderful Life in the U.S. In that production, Aitken used four actors, three trunks and two ladders to capture the style of pre-World War II British studio films—with a fond sprinkling of allusions to Hitchcock’s later Hollywood films.

Such inventive staging and love of film history were the basis of Aitken’s concept for As You Like It. The proscenium was framed by stacked bins of film cans. The action that precedes the play—the banishment of the rightful Duke and his separation from his daughter Rosalind—was staged as a silent film, with strobe lighting to reproduce the viewing experience. When the curtain rose to begin the play, a cavernous “soundstage” was revealed in which the scenes were set up and played. To fulfill the concept of a black-and-white film by “Will Studios,” the costumes and props (including apples) of the opening scenes were in black and white. Mark Capri’s Duke Frederick was reminiscent of a Basil Rathbone villain. Though Francesca Faridany and Miriam Silverman as Rosalind and Celia were immediately winning, I was initially surprised that the cast was using British accents, given the Shakespeare Theatre’s solid identity as an American company. But the use of accents for 1.1–2.3 was just the first part of Aitken’s concept and journey through transatlantic cinematic history.

The transition between the opening six scenes and the forest of Arden was staged silently in sepia tones as a ship disembarkation in “Nieuw Amsterdam.” From that point on—in the mode of The Wizard of Oz—the costumes and sets were in Technicolor. The play-within-a-film conceit also became more explicit from this point, as the cameramen, stagehands and directors more visibly set the stage and called for action. With each new scene, projections announced the change in year from 1778 through 1933. Though not announced, the geographic locations similarly shifted from Nieuw Amsterdam, to Georgia, Mississippi, and Arizona before ending in Hollywood. Likewise the accents and the costumes changed from scene to scene: the program notes cited 180 costumes, four times as many as the Shakespeare Theatre’s average production. The program notes listed the following as “among” the films that inspired the different Arden scenes: Drums along the Mohawk (1939), Gone With the Wind (1939), Showboat (1951), The Searchers (1951), There Will Be Blood (2007) and 42^nd Street (1933). Of course, this list does not explain Touchstone as W.C. Fields and Groucho Marx in the last two scenes.

One of the joys of the Shakespeare Theatre is that its identity as a true repertory company provides the opportunity to see core members in a variety of roles. When the company staged As You Like It in 1997, Floyd King played Jacques and Andrew Long played Oliver, understudying King’s Jacques. Since King often plays Fool characters, his previous performance as Jacques was an excellent showcase for him, allowing him to present a character who was a bridge between Lear’s Fool and purely comic characters. In this production, his Touchstone was generally successful as an entertainer with wisdom; however, he seemed to be particularly challenged by the...