The day had been calm enough, with a mild gray sky hanging low over Stratford-upon-Avon. A gang of swans was gliding implacably down the river, shaking down tourists for bread. And, for a little less than an hour on Tuesday night, a new all-male staging of “As You Like It” by the Royal Shakespeare Company was gliding along, too.
But then, the show broke.
In one (literal) sense, it was probably a motor. Certainly the audience sat in the Royal Shakespeare Theater looking for a long time at a big chunk of the set that had risen up about two feet and then stopped, while ladders behind a curtain were dragged hither and yon. But in another, ecstatic sense, this gorgeous and liberatory “As You Like It” broke right where Shakespeare might have meant for it to break.
At the end of Act I, several aristocratic exiles are heading away from civilization, bound for the Forest of Arden. Each one is leaving the glittering court world out of fear: The clever Rosalind (Jonathan Groff) finds out her wicked uncle, a Duke (Gary Wilmot), wants to kill her; her cousin Celia (Fisayo Akinade) can’t bear to live without her; the handsome Orlando (Elliot Barnes-Worrell) has fallen afoul of a homicidal older brother.
The Duke’s court in this spectacular production by the Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-artistic director, Daniel Evans, is as colorless as a chess set: distorted, grotesque, cold, eerie. Groff’s Rosalind enters in a black Victorian gown through a white door perhaps 20 feet tall; the Duke wears a long black cassock, sliding creepily around like a bishop on a board. At one point, the Duke’s servants wear menacing white-rabbit masks. It’s as if our heroes were all Alices on the wrong side of the looking glass.
As Act I comes to a close, Celia shouts “Now go we in content to liberty,” and heavenly voices start singing “To liberty! To liberty!” Evans has intercut scenes of Celia and Rosalind’s flight with Orlando’s simultaneous dash to freedom, so the room was wound tight with the expectation of escape. But on Tuesday night, as the wall of the court tried to rise out of the way — whirr, bonk, ladies and gentlemen, we are so sorry.
The technical pause gave us time to think about how an all-male cast readjusts Shakespeare’s play, unwinding centuries of practice to arrive again at Elizabethan modes of cross-dressing.
First of all — surprisingly — it gentles the comedy’s cruelty. “As You Like It” can be vicious, its unkind mischief often led by Rosalind, who disguises herself as a boy, Ganymede, and persuades Orlando to “practice” wooing on her. As Ganymede, she mocks womankind and says savage things to the proud shepherdess Phoebe (Tim Preston, giving the evening’s most dizzyingly funny performance), who foolishly falls in love with her tormentor, not knowing it’s Rosalind in trousers.
But Evans’s all-male company, breaking into close-harmony songs whenever it gets a chance, gives the whole thing an air of sweet camaraderie. (It isn’t a coincidence that the vocal arrangements of various Welsh songs require a high, bewitching countertenor.) There’s a variety of approaches to gender here: Some actors dissolve into their feminine portraits, others choose a pantomime dame approach. Whichever choice they make, the jokes don’t hurt them.
And for this particular Rosalind, the forest experience is a chance to actually discard disguise. In the greenwood, Groff will get to wear cute hiking shorts and speak basso! How good it is to be oneself.
Anticipation mounted the more that the stage managers told the audience to wait. After more than an hour, Evans himself announced (to cheers) that the Royal Shakespeare Company crew had “lifted the court manually” out of the fugitives’ way. The Forest of Arden then finally, finally arrived: a huge, sunlit hillside of moss and high grasses. Characters romp up and over this multilevel fairy tale glade, or peep from among its green tussocks, like birds looking out of a hedge. (The set designer Anisha Fields, the sound designer Paul Groothuis and the lighting designer Ryan Day collaborate to give the whole theater a drowsy summer peace.)
An “As You Like It” usually takes its tenor from its Rosalind, and Groff is a particularly fond and joyful one. Even when he’s mocking someone, Groff has a gift for radiating sincere affection not just to other characters (he and Barnes-Worrell strike real sparks) but into the audience. In the epilogue — when Rosalind swears she’ll kiss anyone in the audience with “beards that pleased me” — the promise felt plausible.
The key of Evans’s production lies with Celia, the wry straight woman and tart sidekick. She’s genuinely hurt by the way Rosalind talks about women, and the threatened break between these two great friends is the one moment of true risk in the show. The superb Akinade is so hilarious that Evans often stations him, unspeaking, on a tuffet center stage, just to provide a kind of constantly available reaction shot. (I kept checking in with Celia during Rosalind’s weirder japes. Her face usually said, “Nope.”)
But on opening night, it was the technical accident that primarily governed the show’s chaos-on-the-brink mood: the sense that we might never get to the forest if everyone in the house didn’t hold their breath and pray. I’m sure they can’t break the set every night, but I will note for future reference that it does promote an ebullient solidarity.
Even without the unifying fear of collapse, though, I expect that Evans and his super ensemble maintain their dazzling sense of common delight. This is a group moving perfectly in concert, as elegantly balanced as dancers. Perhaps the finest scene of the night is the four-way confessional of love between the goofy forest local Silvius (Edward Judge), his love-object Phoebe, her love-object Rosalind, and her love-object Orlando. “Tell this youth what ’tis to love,” demands Phoebe. “It is to be all made of sighs and tears,” Silvius replies.
Well, it hasn’t been for Orlando and Ganymede. They have laughed and laughed throughout their courtship, and the whole hillside has grown giddy in response. (Giddy originally meant “possessed by a god,” which feels relevant to this soft, green bacchanal.) “As You Like It” ends with four marriages, and Evans takes his time to stage them with a slow joy and dignity. The cast dances a kind of pavane, singing yet another heart-stoppingly lovely song. And then man after man after man steps smiling into another man’s arms.
As You Like It Through Nov. 7 at the Royal Shakespeare Theater in Stratford-upon-Avon, England; rsc.org.uk/as-you-like-it.
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