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