As You Like It
by William Shakespeare
At The Rococo Garden, Painswick
7.30 pm Tues 6 – Sat 10 July 2010
Matinee 2 pm Sat 10 July
Tickets available from 18 January – click here
Introductory notes from our Director
I would like
to wish you a warm welcome to our production of ‘As You Like It’.
I invite you to sit back and enjoy a world in which the nature of
jealousy and love are reflected by the responses of the people we meet
at court and in the Forest of Arden, where we question the nature of
love and encounter the need for love, either fulfilled or not.
This ensemble production questions the very nature of our need for that
most precious of human desires and needs – love.
As the play opens, we are treated to spectacle of brother pitted
against brother, of uncle against daughter. Orlando is banished
to the wood in favour of his elder brother, Oliver, and in a mirrored
extension of this theme of fraternal hatred Duke Frederick in his
passion of jealousy exiles his niece, Rosalind, his brother’s only
child. She takes his own daughter Celia into banishment with her,
and they enter the Forest of Arden, where nothing is quite as it
seems.
After a fight
with the Duke’s man Charles, and goading from Mademoiselle La Belle,
Orlando and his trusty henchman Adam find their way into this ‘desert
place’ and there encounter succour; Celia and Rosalind disguise
themselves as country folk, as brother and sister, Rosalind as
‘Ganymede’ and Celia as a shepherdess; the other characters appear out
of the wood and gravitate toward the court of Duke Senior, Frederick’s
banished brother; as time passes, the members of Frederick’s court,
including Oliver, also find themselves within the wood, mesmerised by
its power and natural rhythms, some beautiful and some harsh.
The whole is
parenthesised by two fools, Touchstone and Jaques, who epitomise two
sides of the same coin: one feigning and fooling in the lighter,
nonchalant sense, the other twisting and weaving a sense of deprecation
and malice over all events and every supposed encumbrance. Within
the forest we also meet the lovers, the would-be lovers, the social
climbers and the forced lovers, and we learn of the heartbreak of
Silvius, the disappointed love of Phebe as she longs for ‘Ganymede’,
and the simple honesty of the shepherd Corin. Lord Amiens sings
of love, whilst Touchstone cuts his losses and teams up with the gamely
Audrey, and the ensemble bring the couples slowly but surely together
in their matched and mismatched loves. As Jaques ruminates upon
the mortality of man, Rosalind considers the folly of the male, and we
veer toward a superficial jollity which masks the deeper questions of
love and the expectation we have of love.
In a departure from previous shows, this is an ambitious ensemble
production full of life and vigour where we have blurred the boundaries
between the stage and stand and ask you, the audience, to consider what
you think love is.
Edward Derbyshire
Guest Director