Customer Reviews

William Shakespeare: As You Like It (Recorded live at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre) [Blu-ray]

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Thea Sharrocks's "As You Like It" is a welcome addition to filmed versions of the play. The most accessible films are the BBC/TimeLife version from the late 1970s and the 2006 Kenneth Branagh film set in Japan both of which suffer from the effort to make the Forest of Arden a realistic rather than magical place of our imagination. The plainness of the Globe stage allows Shakespeare's words and characters to transport us from the corrupt, violent court to the pastoral world of the forest where all are welcomed and accepted for who they are. The transformation from court to forest is simply shown by the removal of black draperies from the columns to reveal plain wood 'trees,' which allow us to enter a world of music and tranquility.
The production is spirited and lively and the actors certainly seem to be enjoying it. There is tremendous sense of fun. The only slightly sour note is the unnecessarily violent expulsion of Oliver by Duke Frederick.
As Rosalind, one of the most demanding female roles in Shakespeare, Naomi Frederick performs superbly, portraying a woman of wit and intelligence while maintaining a balance between femininity and masculinity. Moving easily between Rosalind and Ganymede, she is in control while indulging in witty banter with Orlando but reveals her feminine vulnerability to Aliena as soon as he has gone. She is ably supported by Laura Rogers as Celia/Aliena, who conveys a warmth and sense of humor not often seen in this role. Jack Laskey as Orlando is suitably 'Byronic' as the romantic hero who needs to learn from Rosalind that his unrealistic view of love can lead only to disillusionment.
The Jaques of Tim McMullan is a fresh interpretation of the part. The "Seven Ages Of Man" speech is meaningfully delivered (he even delights the audience by picking out a 'whining schoolboy' from their midst). Dominic Rowan's highly energetic Touchstone is a great crowd pleaser whose physical presentation of the "lie seven times removed" evokes much laughter. Of the other minor characters, the old shepherd Corin stands out. Sean Kerns invests him with dignity confirming the worth of the simple life of a shepherd. The songs which are an integral apart of the play are enhanced by the pleasant voice of Peter Gale.
In addition to the filmed performance, a cast gallery and famous speeches are included on the disc. These extra features should prove useful for educational purposes.
This video is a thoroughly entertaining production of one of Shakespeare's happiest plays. I recommend it highly.
Irene Farrance/TW

O wonderful, wonderful! And most wonderful, wonderful! And yet again wonderful! And after that out of all whooping! This is such a joyful production of As You Like It, which is perhaps Shakespeare's most joyful play. E.S. Wilks' review expresses better than I can much of what is excellent about this performance. (After watching this DVD, I began to fantasize about whether Shakespeare, having created the marvelous Jacques with his "melancholy of [his] own, compounded of many simples," wondered how the character would fare in a tragedy and wrote Hamlet. I caught a glimpse of Jacques as an older Hamlet who, in an alternative universe, had decided not to return to the Danish court after his abortive voyage to England.)
Filmed live performances often have an archival feel to them; if the production was good, you're glad to have it, but it's a far cry from being there. In this DVD, the audience is part of the set and the performance. (And after watching the frightening aging of the Shakespeare audience in this country, it was a joy to see so many young faces in the audience obviously enjoying themselves.) The editing and use of multiple cameras is superb. This is not just a record of a live performance; it is a work of art in its own right. Although performed in Elizabethan costume in the replica of the Globe Theater (complete with groundings leaning on the stage), it is far from a museum piece. The jazz music during the "intermission" and curtain calls worked well. Instead of a faithful representation of what a performance might have looked and sounded like in 17th century London, we get an impression of what it might have felt like to be a member of that audience. All the humor and humanity is returned to the play.
If you have any interest in seeing this play, do choose this DVD rather than the leaden and mangled Branagh version or the overly reverential and unfunny BBC one. Enjoy it for yourself, and then leave it around for your children to find. Perhaps they can be surprised into the beginning of a lifelong love before the school system has had a chance to bore them into a permanent hatred of Shakespeare.

RATING:

My rating of 4 stars represents how I view the quality of this stage production in relation to other stage productions of plays which I have viewed. Therefore, one should not compare my rating to motion picture productions, since I employ a much more rigorous rating system to motion pictures.


INTRODUCTION:

The production is a stage production filmed at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in front of an audience. The theatre attempts to recreate, as much as possible, the design and feel of Shakespeare's day.

From time to time throughout the play, Touchstone and Jaques engage the audience. For example, when giving his famous "all the world's a stage" recital, Jaques looks directed into the faces of some adolescent British school boys who are standing near the stage as he recites "then the whining schoolboy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / unwillingly to school." Clearly, the actors and actresses attempt to keep the audience involved, as much as possible.


STAGING:

This stage production plays up Sir Oliver Martext as a blind, incompetent idiot. When exiting the stage, Sir Oliver bumps into a tree and says, "Excuse me" to it.

Corin is played as a simple shepherd, who has dignity. This production conveys that Corin enjoys his job as a shepherd even if he cannot outperform Touchstone's wit.

William is also portrayed as a very stupid man. While I knew this from the script, after watching this stage production, I saw a portrayal of a mentally challenged man who cannot correctly give a flower to the woman he is desperate a touch. (Williams presents the flower to Audrey upside down.)

Touchstone's character is also played up. He definitely is an articulate, comic character in this stage production, who dominates a number of scenes with his wit and humor. Touchstone's relationship with Aubrey is particularly humorous. The stage production certainly conveys the idea in the play that "for thy [their] loving voyage / is but for two months" (V.5.180-181). When reading the play, I really did not completely grasp just how great a libertine Touchstone could be.

Almost immediately after kissing Ganymede, Orlando discovers that Ganymede is really Rosalind. (Yet, Orlando still pretends he does not know. As viewers, we know because Orlando begins pronouncing the name Rosalind a bit differently and gives a few other subtle hints, which make the audience laugh.)

In this stage production, Ganymede (Rosalind) begins reading Phoebe's letter in front of Silvius until she reaches the portion in which Phoebe's shows that she is still in love with Ganymede. Then, Silvius snatches the letter and begins reading the parts of the letter that demonstrate Phoebe's infatuation with Ganymede. Because of this switch, I internally questioned whether Rosalind was really reading the letter or making up passages by which Phoebe criticizes Ganymede, in order to benefit Silvius' self-esteem.


Certain actors play multiple roles in the play:
Amiens plays Martext
Oliver de Bois plays William.


EDITING/DELETIONS:

The order of a few scenes is also switched. For example, the audience is introduced to Rosalind and Celia before the scene in which Oliver and Charles communicate.

The production skips quite a few lines throughout the play, including the lines where Ganymede claims to be a magician. However, I do not believe excluding those lines harmed the quality of the production.

This is the way I imagine the Globe in Shakespeare's day. A simple stage with minimal effects. The audience members were pushed up to the stage since every ticket counted towards the bottom line. The stars of the DVD were the actors -- as it should have been. No special effects. The costumes aided the actors, but didn't distract from fine acting. The words of Shakespeare and the actor's talents transported the audience to a royal court or a forest.

I was torn between awarding this production four or five stars, finally opting for four.

On the positive side, it is a highly competent production with very few false notes. The actors are uniformly good (without being excellent-- more on that below), and it moves along at a nice brisk pace, completely avoiding the heaviness and misplaced solemnity of lesser productions. It's also a huge plus that it is a record of an actual stage production, meaning the text survives virtually intact, and the sense of live occasion is vividly recreated.

What gives me pause, however, is the lack of truly stand-out performances among the principals. Only Tim McMullen's Jaques strikes me as truly inspired casting, as he has the requisite charisma to carry a role that is most successful when the performer is able to generate audience sympathy from force of personality alone. Touchstone is a similar type of role, and while I certainly find Dominic Rowan's Touchstone competent (and even quite amusing at times), he is not as memorable as he could (and should) be. There is little comparison between him and Lewis Gordon's Touchstone in the CBC production (sadly, very difficult to find on DVD), much less Alfred Molina in Branagh's film version (who manages to make a huge impact, despite having a substantial number of his lines cut).

While it would be an exaggeration to say Jack Laskey's Orlando grates, his propensity for inserting little micro-pauses in the middle of lines (presumably to make them seem spontaneously generated) quickly becomes a predictable mannerism, ironically making the performance seem more studied, not less. Naomi Frederick's Rosalind is, in my view, better, but not a stand-out. This production plays very much as an ensemble piece when, quite frankly, I think it has to be carried squarely on the shoulders of the actress playing Rosalind for it to have maximum impact. Both Roberta Maxwell (CBC) and (somewhat surprisingly) Bryce Dallas Howard (for Branagh) are better in this regard. Laura Rogers' Celia, however, among the smaller parts, is a bit of a stand-out.

In sum, I enjoyed watching this, had a smile on my face throughout, but didn't really feel any deep emotional connection to the performance. I suspect I would have enjoyed it more had I actually been in the audience. The CBC production (assuming one can find it and can overlook the poor image quality) remains my favorite currently available *As You Like It* on DVD, and Branagh's severely truncated film version is also enjoyable in its own way (and successful on its own terms). The old BBC production and the Olivier film are not even in the running as far as I am concerned. For the teachers: the DVD does have full subtitles.

This was really fun. The addition of the thrust, stairs and walkways into the audience, and the brilliant use of them enhanced the production. The complete elimination of the 4th wall was well-done. The acting is superb, the performances brilliant. The only thing that was jarring was the rather modern curtain-call music/dance number ... but other than that this was great. It should be viewed by those interested in Shakespeare, by actors, and just those who want to see a fun show. They really brought out the humor in this one, something that often gets lost in performances of Shakespeare.

I was glad this was a staged version rather than a movie. Great condition, received in great time.

I am making absolutely no effort to review the play itself, as it is wonderful as most anyone who reads this review will already know, and so I will be considering merely this particular presentation of the play. From that perspective I feel that three stars is a fair rating as the production has its good and bad aspects. First on to the positive, the atmosphere was a great deal of fun, as you get to see inside a recreation of the Globe Theatre, which will no doubt give any fan of the Bard at least a bit of a tingle. I couldn't help but feel more than a little envious of those actually in the audience that day.

The performances are hit and miss, as they often are with any production, and depending on the importance you place on a particular character this can really damage your enjoyment of a particular play. I feel that Jack Laskey makes a fine Orlando. A bit too much yelling (though the theatre aspect may have influenced that a bit) but he is handsome and physical enough for the part. McMullan's Jaques I found highly enjoyable for the most part, save with a few reservations that I will discuss at the end. I think my favorite performance came from Laura Rogers as Celia, a part filled with wit and good humor, which I have been told can be quite difficult to pull off, yet she manages quite well. As for Rosalind, I found Naomi Frederick adequate (which is perhaps unfair since she had to do far more of the heavy lifting). I personally found the whole suspension of disbelief rather difficult (and when she and Orlando wear practically the same outfits, it is a bit eerie). While she was pleasant enough, I couldn't help but wonder why Orlando was wasting time on her when Celia was readily available. Did I mention I enjoyed Celia?

As to my problems with the production, I found the cast (mostly Touchstone, but also Orlando and a few others) sometimes viewed into comedy that was downright slapstick in nature. Not to say that Shakespeare never engaged in such methods, but there were times when I felt it distracted from the quality of the play. I could hear Hamlet gnashing his teeth somewhere in the back of my brain. Also there is a great deal of playing directly to the audience, breaking the fourth wall, if you will. Now this might have been common practice back in the Globe's heyday, but it felt quite odd at times and took me away from the performance as a whole. However you might not mind that sort of thing at all.

I thought her a terrible Rosalind, and without Rosalind, AYLI is nothing. Where's Shakespeare's games with androgeny? Not here. Sort of... less sophisticated than Shakespeare's original, less funny, less most things. Because of the lack of Rosalind. Her portrayal struck me as very straight here, like an ordinary character, and the thing about AYL is, our Rosalind isn't an ordinary character. Rosalind has to be alchemy, do alchemy. A big ask, but let's not say impossible. I'm convinced that the audience has to fall in love with Rosalind, whatever sex or persuasion they happen to be, and that's the gorgeousness of AYL. I fell in love with Helen Mirren, early in life, even though, on adult inspection, she isn't ideal in the part. Still, she charmed the pants off me, and I do believe that's the point of the play.

I liked a lot about this production, but if you're not in a swoon with Rosalind (be your genitalia what they may) it's a failure.