There is of course no single correct way to mount Shakespeare's plays, but the solutions should lie within certain limits. The Forest of Arden here can no more do without verdure and warm sunlight than the Athenian woods in Midsummer Night's Dream can do without foliage and magic moonlight. Peter Brook's recent staging of the latter in a glaring white squash court provided an unrelievedly offensive evening. This As You Like It is far from being such a total disaster, but the approach adopted does constitute a barrier rather than a bridge.
Kahn has done a little textual trimming and rearranging to bring the running time down to exactly two hours and a half. And Jane Greenwood has created an attractive bunch of period costumes, although the period is considerably later than Elizabethan.
The major acting burden falls on the heroine Rosalind, which is the longest female role in all Shakespeare (there are ten or so longer male parts, topped by Hamlet, Richard III, Iago and Henry V). Rosalind is longer even than Cleopatra, which is the most difficult of the women's roles. Bernard Shaw attributed the great popularity of Rosalind to three factors: she speaks blank verse only for a few minutes; she wears a skirt only a few minutes; and she makes love to the man instead of waiting for him to make love to her. The last idea of the woman-as-pursuer was especially dear to Shaw, who went on to use it as the basis for Ann Whitefield, the driving force of his masterly Man and Superman.
Women become actresses in part so that they may become someone else for a while. They jump at the chance to play Rosalind since it allows them to extend the make-believe to the point of portraying a young man who mocks the moods of a woman in love. Originally this artificiality was carried one remove further because all female roles were played by boy-actors. (England once more saw an all-male As You Like It in 1920, and, more recently, at the National Theatre in 1967.)
The current Rosalind is the much-honored Eileen Atkins, making her AST debut. Mis Atkins is no stranger to the part, having played it (in bluejeans) back home with the Royal Shakespeare Company three years ago. She is still young enough for the role, though she is not so pretty as one would like. Her angular face is no insuperable drawback, however, since she spends most of the play disguised as a curly-headed Ganymede in a riding outfit.
In a generally unfussy performance, she speaks Shakespeare's language naturally and swiftly, trippingly on the tongue. She is at her best in a passage like the one where she describes to Orlando the earmarks of a man in love. But at times an unwelcome hard edge creeps into her voice. In addition, I miss the extraordinary radiance and ebullience an ideal Rosalind should convey--a task that would be easier amid less bleak surroundings.
Tovah Feldshuh is amusing as Rosalind's inseparable cousin Celia--vivacious and at times even giddy. On her first entrance she looks just lovely in her white and gold costume. Later she appears with properly besmirched cheeks, toting a caged bird through the forest.
The second-largest role--though much less than half the size of Rosalind's--belongs to the hero Orlando, the object of Rosalind's sporting. Kenneth Welsh makes him sufficiently fervent and brave. Orlando is Shakespeare's most athletic hero, and Welsh is stocky and muscular. But as staged here he certainly doesn't deserve the prize in the wrestling match, though this is not the reason the evil duke, in a nice touch, takes the purse of money away from him. As Charles, Edwin Owens speaks far better than we would expect of a professional wrestler.
Touchstone (not found in the source novel) is Shakespeare's first intentional fool, a character the playwright would vastly improve on in Twelfth Night, All's Well, and King Lear. It is a tribute to George Hearn's skill that, with rouged cheeks and polychrome doublet, he makes this satirizing role better than it really is; and he fully merits the applause his speech on duelling elicits.
Jaques (also Shakespeare's invention), the cheerless square peg in a round hole, reflects the Elizabethan era's fascination with neurotic states of mind (as in the plays of Ben Jonson), which would climax a few years later in the publication of Burton's huge Anatomy of Melancholy. Jaques is the counterpart of Malvolio in Twelfth Night, which Philip Kerr played so admirably here two years ago. Kerr is now imbuing Jaques with the same wide-stanced, pigeon-toed gait he used for Malvolio. To this he has added a wonderful pasty face and a hilarious mannerism of gargling his r's in words like 'warble' and 'warp.' Since Jaques not only is a malcontent but also enjoys parading his melancholia, he carries a little notebook and pencil in which to jot down cynical quips for future use. Another bull's-eye for Kerr.
If this production is short on transcendent acting, it is for once also totally free of atrocious elocution--even in the bit parts, where one tends to find vocal ineptitude. I cannot fail to mention Tom McDermott's lovable portrayal of the tired old Adam, a role that some evidence indicates Shakespeare himself originally played. Praise too for Keith Baker, making his AST debut as Amiens; not only does he speak well but he proves himself an absolutely splendid tenor in rendering Lee Hoiby's songs. And the bright E-major setting of "It was a lover and his lass," the loveliest song in all the plays (albeit extraneous here), is enchantingly and impeccably sung by two little boy-sopranos, Harold Safferstein and David Vogel. These lads then scatter blossoms on the ground before the concluding lei-bedecked wedding festivities and swirling jig. But all this is not enough to make one forget the absence of green, green, green.