It appears that productions are more likely to fail when Rosalind suppresses her sexuality through disguise. Peter Holland commented of David Thacker’s 1992 production:
Samantha Bond’s Rosalind belonged to the tradition aptly defined by Lindsay Duguid: ‘[She] is wholesome and pert with her slightly husky actress’s voice and her gamine gestures (legs apart, arms akimbo, hands in pockets, and so on). The English actress playing Rosalind is a gender all her own’ … If this was Rosalind in a limbo of gender it was also Rosalind without sexuality. For in a play so full of sexual desire the production saw only clichéd romance, epitomised by the long hard look between Celia and Oliver at the end of 4.3 or their rapt attention of each other in 5.4.104
From what we can glean from the wildly divergent opinions of Sophie Thompson’s exuberant performance as Rosalind in 1989, she emphasized the sexual immaturity of a young woman discovering sex for the first time:
The result is very different from the romantic heroines of yore. Her Rosalind is part waif, part tomboy, a naïve, gawky girl who can mug and fool, tickle an irritating friend, but also play purposeful games when the time comes. With that bewildered heart-throb, Flynn’s Orlando, you feel she is testing the sexual waters, readying herself for a plunge that may one day end her, as she claims, ‘fathoms deep in love’.105
What’s so Funny?
The major problem in producing the play today lies not in Orlando and Rosalind, whose relationship, for all its fantastic context, seems to have an everlasting modernity, but in finding satisfactory modern equivalents for its sixteenth-century variety turns.106
In As You Like It “the love action is supervised by the counter-clowns Touchstone and Jaques.”107 Like many elements in the play, these two characters offer us “juxtapositions of opposites”:108 Touchstone the professional clown, and Jaques the natural melancholic, punctuate the play with opposing witticisms. Unfortunately, comedy does have a tendency to date, and Touchstone, more than most Shakespearean comic roles, does not seem to have stood the test of time. B. A. Young of the Financial Times, having witnessed many productions of As You Like It, stated: “it would take [Buster] Keaton himself to persuade me that Touchstone is funny.”109
David Tennant, who played the part in 1996, eventually discovered humor in the role, but on initial inspection of the character, he concluded:
I could see that Touchstone was supposed to be funny in terms of the structure of the play, the tone of his scenes, and the fact that everyone keeps going on about how hilarious he is. Jaques in particular, an otherwise miserable sod, when confronted with Touchstone, finds his ‘lungs began to crow like Chanticleer’ [2.7.30] and yet I could find nothing in the part to make me even smile … long speeches heavy with obscure double entendres and long tracts of cool philosophy, but nothing obviously funny.110
The actor playing Touchstone often has to resort to obvious visual gags or crude humor in order to get a laugh from the audience. In Adrian Noble’s 1985 production an onstage pool offered the inevitability of a pratfall. One reviewer commented:
5. An initial impression of cool philosophy rather than obvious humor: David Tennant as Touchstone, with Arthur Cox as Corin, in Steven Pimlott’s 1996 production.
Worst of all … is the strip cartoon, slapstick routines provided by Nicky Henson’s Touchstone.… Henson ends up in a pool at least three times, and provides a most laboured and unfunny illustration of the ‘lie seven times removed’ speech, in which the rest of the cast are made … to join in. His routine ends with a chorus of mock farts.111
Paul Chahidi in the RSC’s 2005 production managed to make Touchstone funny, successfully engaging the audience, which he had “eating out of his hand.”112 Nevertheless, he, too, had to find humor in visual gags and asides added to what Shakespeare has supplied: “Paul Chahidi is that rarest of things, a genuinely funny Touchstone, never more entertaining than in an inspired routine when he treads in something nasty in the forest”:113 “[He] works wonders with the thankless role of Touchstone … [but] can’t resist milking his chatty relationship with front-row spectators.”114
Buzz Goodbody updated the character in an attempt to give the audience a contemporary equivalent: “Certainly the director, Buzz Goodbody, was not one for half measures. Touchstone, court-jester, became the television comedian, who has transmigrated from the music hall to the new medium.”115 In the same production (1973), modern literary references informed Richard Pasco’s widely applauded performance as Jaques. He portrayed him as “one of those hypochondriacal patients of Dr Chekhov who are in mourning for their life”:116
In a seedily smart suit, wispy-haired, fiddling with gold-rimmed spectacles, he diffuses the bulbous fragility of an alcoholic, precariously cured, whose self-disgust still expresses itself in rapid apprehension and exuberant fancy. He enriches the Ages of Man speech by making each age a self-contained antithesis, with a twist in the tail. He signals recognition of each predictable folly with a most delicate play of feature, points each deflationary line with a musical accuracy which is a joy in itself. He gives an enormously enjoyable performance, like many a Jaques before him; and like all fine rather than merely exciting players, he expands one’s understanding of human nature.117
Because the comedy does not often work with modern audiences, directors have added an extra dimension to both Touchstone and Jaques by emphasizing their similarities rather than their differences. In 1961,
Mr Max Adrian and Mr Colin Blakely are a Jaques and a Touchstone who seem to take a genuine pleasure in each other’s company. The egoist’s wisdom, it has been said, is half fooling, as Touchstone’s fooling is half wisdom, and both seem delightedly aware of their true relations.118
In Terry Hands’ 1980 production the characters of Touchstone and Jaques ran parallel to each rather than being opposites. Derek Godfrey’s Jaques demonstrated a talent for clowning and also revealed a lustful side, showing he was equally under Arden’s influence:
a close bond develops between these two. From the moment when Derek Godfrey, instead of simply reporting his meeting with a fool in the forest, launches into his own clown routine. This being a performance show, Joe Melia’s Touchstone is a whole-time performer as much as Audrey’s balding lover as when called upon to do a turn for the Duke … Much more surprising but thoroughly in keeping with the fertility motif, Jaques is shown falling for Rosalind who half-succumbs to being folded in his cloak before her real lover arrives on the scene and the sound of youthful laughter drives Jaques back into solitude.119
In the majority of productions Jaques as the melancholic is also the outsider of the pastoral world, the world of love. In productions that emphasized “the tyrannical rule of Duke Frederick’s court as either a fascist or a communist dictatorship … Jaques was shown either as … a political dissident or a student agitator.”120 His separateness from the other characters in the play was taken to an interesting extreme in John Caird’s 1989 production:
The whole world seemed a show put on for [Jaques’] benefit; indeed, at times he took a seat in the front of the stalls to watch the parade of folly, leaping back onto the stage at, for instance, [3.3.61] to help Touchstone get married. The bitterness of his out-of-place dignity turned his report on Touchstone into a brutal language that this Touchstone would not have used … his final comments to Touchstone [5.4.184–5] were inordinately vicious, provoking a response of genuine distress from Touchstone himself.121
The way in which Jaques was costumed and lit also added an extra dimension of sinister foreboding to the character, giving him a darkly metaphysical presence:
a suave, crisply spoken Jaques, with elegant overcoat, trilby hat, and walking cane, separating him sharply from his ragged co-mates in exile. He had an unforgettable moment as he stood still and silent upstage behind Hymen, his dark clothes lost against the background, top lighting catching his cheek-bones and giving him a startling cadaverous look for this “last scene of all.”122
Jaques is also often portrayed as a timeless figure or, indeed, like Rosalind, a character at odds with the society in which he finds himself. In 1992, Michael Siberry played
a dark, elegant, superbly spoken Jaques … a handsome, battered man in early middle age, majestically embittered and revelling in it with the relish of an exhibitionist. His revulsion at the slaughter of animals is quite genuine, which only reminds you that Shakespeare was writing for an age which found pleasure in their public torture and killing. Even Queen Elizabeth preferred bear-baiting to stage plays. Once again, the dramatist is light years ahead of his time.123
The tendency for modern productions to focus on the darker elements in the play has sometimes gone too far, draining the comedy of its humor, vitality, and passion. Steven Pimlott’s 1996 production provided
few laughs and almost no delight. Touchstone (David Tennant) works hard to make some sour humour out of Arden … Niamh Cusack plays Rosalind as if she has been told to avoid all playfulness, and Rachel Joyce as Celia declines all chances of wryness in her commentaries on the follies of lovers.124
John Woodvine, however, was praised as “a wonderfully grave, sententious Jacques whose seven-ages-of-man speech acquires unusual poignancy when he discovers that old Adam has quietly expired.”125 What is often described as Shakespeare’s most accessible and enjoyable comedy throws some decidedly difficult curves for the modern director. The frequency with which the play is revived in the modern repertoire attests to its popularity with audiences, but has resulted in very idiosyncratic approaches, turning a pleasing comedy into a melancholy tale of exile and isolation, a feminist tract, or modern psychodrama. As Penny Gay points out, “a final loss of directorial innocence … is the hallmark of most modern productions.” In our postmodern culture, directors know that there is no such thing as a simple “trust in the given material.”126
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH DOMINIC COOKE AND MICHAEL BOYD
Dominic Cooke was born in 1966 and educated at the University of Warwick. His Arabian Nights (1998) won a TMA/Equity Award for Best Show for Young People after it was produced at The Young Vic and on tour in 1998. He was associate director first at the Royal Court Theatre and then with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where his productions included Cymbeline, Macbeth, John Marston’s The Malcontent, the acclaimed As You Like It (with Lia Williams as Rosalind) that he talks about here and an equally acclaimed rendition of Arthur Miller’s The Crucible. He was nominated for an Evening Standard Theatre Award in 2003 for Best Director. In 2007 he returned to the Royal Court, Britain’s leading venue for new theater writing, as artistic director.
Michael Boyd was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English Literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the Henry VI plays in the RSC’s “This England: The Histories” in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006–07. His own contribution to this was a cycle of all eight history plays, from Richard II through to Richard III, with the same company of actors. This transfered to London’s Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. He talks here about his 2009 production of As You Like It in the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, with Katy Stephens as Rosalind.
It’s very much a play of two worlds—the court and the country. How did you and your designer set about conveying that?
DC: We were more interested in the connections between the two worlds than their differences. The set remained the same throughout; we had a very large tree which served both for an urban garden and the middle of a forest. The tree was an evergreen, so it could also work through the seasons, which was an important feature of the production. We moved from winter to summer to autumn, so that the end of the play felt like harvesttime. We started the play at Christmas, with the tree as a Christmas tree. We chose Christmas because it is a time where loss is keenly felt. Rosalind has lost her father, and this was a time where she would usually be with him, so her memories of him brought on the melancholy she felt at the start of the play. Family conflicts often happen at Christmas too, so the Oliver/Orlando row was put into context. We were also interested in the summer-holiday quality to the third act of the play, as Ganymede tutors Orlando. The only way that we emphasized the different worlds visually was through costume. The court was a nighttime world of formal evening dress, Arden was a cross between a summer holiday and Lord of the Flies. The transformation from court into country was done by the actors who doubled as the dukes and the respective courts. As we first moved into the Forest of Arden, to take us into Duke Senior’s “Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile” speech, the actors took their tops off as it snowed, as if Duke Senior’s celebrating the honest, harsh reality of nature as opposed to the artificial, deceitful world of the Court.
MB: The court is often portrayed as deeply unattractive, but Tom Piper, the designer, and I felt that the dukedom should look as if it was worth fighting for. We also wanted it to boast of the purity and the reformed color palette of a “new broom” revolutionary court. Two uninterrupted rectangles of very pale parquet against which the restrictive choreography and black Elizabethan dress of Frederick’s world could be seen to be striking as well as oppressive.
6. Dominic Cooke production, 2005: Duke Senior’s exiles return to the harsh but honest reality of nature.
Arden then became a subversive dismantling of the too-perfect court, a humanizing reinvention of its constituent parts through poor theater improvisation.
The received idea of Arden is sentimental and decorative, but Shakespeare talks of winter, rough weather, exile, and a hard-earned subsistence. Frederick’s troops are attacking the woods, and animals are hunted and slain not for sport but for “venison.”
As the exiled world reinvents for us how best to live, the high collars and corsets disappear and gradually the visual world moves from the rigid uniformity of Renaissance Protestant revolution to a colorful pluralism of contemporary dress.
A careful reading of the text suggests that Arden is not a single place: Corin seems to be a farmer on the fringes of the forest, faced with real economic problems, whereas the duke and his men hunting the stag seem to be in deep, perhaps more mythic, woodlands (Robin Hood and all that). Was this an angle you explored?
DC: With Arden, Shakespeare is contrasting the myth of the pastoral idyll with the reality of the hardship of country life. We played the cold weather in the early Arden scenes, showing how difficult it is to actually survive in the wild, especially for the exiles, used to the creature comforts of the court. We imagined a shift from winter to summer before Act 3 Scene 1, which is where we placed the interval.
I was very interested in the conflict between Duke Senior’s idealization of the life of the exiled court and Jaques’ cynicism. For me, every scene of As You Like It contrasts a romantic with a realistic view of life, and that exists as much in the court as in the country scenes. Duke Senior’s opening speech expresses the notion that by throwing off the shackles of civilization it is possible to reveal an inner authenticity, free of “painted pomp,” whereas Jaques’ view is that life is a series of different performances—as expressed in his “seven ages of man” speech—and there is no “inner core”: the idea that you can throw off civilization and become this pure being, to him, is just a sentimental myth, a political ideology to make the exiles feel that their
lot, which is pretty miserable, is actually a happy one. Also, Duke Senior has a difficult political situation on his hands. We learn from Charles the wrestler that the forest lords have “thrown themselves into voluntary exile,” but when they get to Arden they find that they’ve exposed themselves to “winter and rough weather,” so Duke Senior’s optimism could also be read as an attempt to convince them that it’s all going to be worth it and they should stick with him. I suppose that makes Amiens his chief propagandist.
MB: The woods of Corin, Silvius, and Phoebe are comically overlaid with idealized, mythic notions of courtly love every bit as much as the duke’s exiled court’s “inner” forest is in search of the mythic simplicities of the “golden age.” Both sets of forest dwellers live in actual hardship, and from the word go there is a busy traffic between them: Orlando, Touchstone, Jaques, Rosalind, and Oliver all meet long before the wedding. The main distinction (even if in part the result of disguise) is one of class.
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