AS YOU LIKE IT
AS YOU LIKE IT, Siren Theatre Co at Bay 20, CarriageWorks, April 23-May 7 2011
KATE GAUL is a director I admire and whose work I look forward to with pleasure and curiosity. Her 2010 Siren production of The Seagull was a highlight of the Sydney theatre year, for instance, and her ideas for As You Like It are as imaginative and ambitious as ever.
This time the setting for Shakespeare’s great rom-com is the cavernous emptiness of Bay 20 with a strung-up line of what appear to be old quilts and curtains as backdrop with a live band of musicians in front of it – plain and simple, giving the actors room to move and the audience space to think, see, feel and savour the ebb and flow of characters and places that is both the ducal palace and the Forest of Arden.
Essentially, much usurping and banishment takes place in the palace in order to move the action to the forest where the rightful duke’s daughter Rosalind and her beloved cousin Celia find themselves sent by Celia’s father– the duke’s younger brother Frederick. Naturally the easiest way for the two girls to survive the wolves of all species that inhabit the wild woods is to disguise themselves as a young man – Ganymede – and a lowly non-princess – Aliena. The guises cause problems for Orlando, the young blade in love with Rosalind, and subsequently for the unsuspecting rustic shepherdess who falls for Ganymede. Orlando, of course, is the younger son of the recently passed Sir Rowland de Bois and should have been taken care of by his elder brother Oliver. Unfortunately as so often happened in aristocratic olde England, Oliver did a bit of usurping of his own, leaving Orlando penniless, ill educated and cranky. And this is pretty much the prologue, of course. What happens over the next couple of hours involves fights, love lost and found, parents and children reunited or not, rightful restorations of this ’n’ that, forgiveness and repentance, and much flummery involving rustics, jesters and all manner of clodhoppers.
On opening night at CarriageWorks many in the audience enjoyed themselves hugely, others did not. There were probably a couple of reasons for this: one obvious, the other perhaps not immediately so. The obvious reason was Gaul’s idea and decision to take the broad comedy and make it even broader by having the non-aristos got up as whiteface clowns. This enables a lot of horsing around and gives Alan Flower, for instance, the dubious gift of cheap laughs and scene-stealing moments in the role of Audrey as she might be played by Fatty Vautin on The Footy Show.
The vital point that seems to escape some in the widely differently-abled cast is that there is more to clowning than a red nose and a face full of white grease paint. And unfortunately for those whose skills in the Shakespeare department are shaky to start with, having the primary tool of conveying meaning and emotion (the face) slathered in all-concealing goop and a painted grin is fatal to the telling of Shakespeare’s convoluted tale with anything like clarity. (Julian Curtis as a tender Orlando and Nicholas Papademetriou – who doubles notably as the dukes – are the exceptions to this sweeping observation, by the way.) The disjuncture isn’t helped by a musical score of semi-cool jazz plus woodland rollicking from Daryl Wallis and Dave Manuel with Ali Hughes as Hymen played as observer-chanteuse.
The second, perhaps less obvious problem for the production is in casting. Rosalind has to be a powerful figure: one an audience can believe is capable of attracting male and female – simultaneously feminine and androgynous. Pamela Rabe was a memorable Rosalind, for instance, and so was Vanessa Redgrave. You probably don’t have to be as tall and authoritative as either, but it helps and Shauntelle Benjamin comes to the role with neither physical stature nor authority. She’s a girl and there’s an end to it. Ironically, she’s much more of a Celia, while Jane Phegan – this production’s Celia – is much more of a Rosalind. Phegan has the fire and charismatic stroppiness that Rosalind needs and here her Celia is much stronger than Rosalind simply because she is. If the two could swap roles the production would have itself something like a focus.
“All the world’s a stage” – says melancholy Jacques. “And all the men and women merely players.” But the emphasis surely shouldn’t be on the “mere” bit. Back to the drawing board Kate: but please keep on keeping on.
