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

While As You Like It abounds in life-affirming energy and mirth, this most cheerful of Shakespeare's romantic comedies also foregrounds humanity's more sinister impulses: jealousy, treachery, and, worst of all, motiveless and limitless hatred. As its plot unfolds, moreover, the drama purposely and repeatedly qualifies—and, at times, even dashes—nearly every expectation that its pastoral setting evokes: Oliver's orchard provides the backdrop for, as well as contributes to, Orlando's disillusionment and violence; Arden's deer suffer usurpation and murderous pursuit at the hands of Duke Senior's banished courtiers while the forest's adders and lions lie in wait for unsuspecting human visitors. When all is said and done, the play seems to say, nearly every living thing will have inflicted and also endured countless acts of deprivation and suffering.

Despite this bleak perspective, though, as the play also affirms, we humans can and frequently will distinguish ourselves from the rest of nature by exercising an innate—irrepressible, even—compulsion to preserve and protect life, a compulsion powerful enough to steer us away from any treachery or vengeance to which we may feel inclined. The more time we allow ourselves to contemplate our connectedness to other living entities, it appears, the more devotedly we seek life-preserving resolutions to our conflicts. What distinguishes us from the rest of nature, then, lies exclusively in our minds, and substantiates Hamlet's contention that "there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so." Throughout his Stratford Shakespeare Festival production, director Des McAnuff dramatized this perplexing human inclination to resist nature's example and to give ourselves freely to others, but set designer Debra Hanson and costume designer Dana Osborne deserved the loudest applause for so

Skye Brandon as Deer.

Photo by David Hou.

clearly differentiating nature's indifference to morality from humanity's dependence upon it.

McAnuff, Hanson, and Osborne achieved this feat by frequently—and literally—fusing the natural world to the human. Just a few examples of this fusion as it appeared in the comedy included a human figure with a wolf 's head who stood guard over Oliver's estate as the play began, dressed in a uniform unambiguously redolent of fascist era Europe (two other guards stood with gauze covering their faces, which also dehumanized them, but in a different manner); a pipe-smoking, tuxedoed stag who observed Touchstone wooing Audrey; a woman with a lioness's head who traversed the stage as Oliver related Orlando...