As You Like It
The Tempest
I always find As You Like It tricky. The insouciant rejection of naturalism in the plot takes it to the extreme edge even of Shakespeare comedies: you need serious poetic magic to accept the lovesick Rosalind’s irrational tactic of staying in britches for prolonged homoerotic woodland wooing games with a man who she already knows adores her, thanks to the awful poems he pins on trees.
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Then you have the whole lion-attack-rescue-reconciliation covered in one rushed speech, and the improbable resolution of the ducal feud in another: as if Shakespeare suddenly thought “Damn, can’t leave them all in the forest, not now the girls are in wedding dresses”.
None of that matters if emotion runs true and the jokes hit home. But it is a brave choice for the second “Bridge” project bringing American and UK actors together — not necessarily experienced Shakespeareans. In the first half I feared for it. Juliet Rylance is a bravely larky, puppyish Rosalind, and the American Michelle Beck her foxy foil. But not all the cast are at ease with the verse: there is a touch of rote-speaking Shakespeareitis, where word-by-word significance is mislaid in a quest for character. A few cuts in the word-play would have helped.
But it grows and lightens in the second half, and the staging is strong: beyond the grey ducal walls an almost equally grey Forest of Arden brightens gradually: no magic clearing full of fairies, this, but a wood you could die in. And the romance is diluted by the rustics and by Stephen Dillane as a dry, hilarious Jacques, cutting through any over-sweetness with sharp asides and — at one point — an unexpected and wholly welcome Bob Dylan impression. The American-directed music and song in both productions, incidentally, is wonderful: unusual and atmospheric.
But it is the second production by director Sam Mendes and his US/UK cast that quickens the breath. If As You Like It is full of poetically inauthentic behaviour in a fantasy forest, The Tempest, for all its magic, is deeply human. The cast also finds that joyful alliance of transatlantic talent which is the aim of the Bridge project, notably in the comedic pairing of Trinculo (Anthony O’Donnell of the RSC) and Stephano (Thomas Sadoski from Broadway) who clearly spark one another off beautifully.
Yet neither comedy nor love story (Rylance now a bit less larky as a naive Miranda) is at this play’s heart. Prospero is. Dillane gives us rare grace and nobility as he evolves from initial vengefulness into weary forgiveness. In early scenes, cleverly, he physically mirrors both Ariel and Caliban (a frighteningly harsh but vulnerable Ron Cephas Jones) when he commands them. As the island fills with drunks and traitors to control he quietens, straightens, sits long at his lectern on the side of the stage, and learns pity from the pale, tormented Ariel (beautiful Christian Camargo, better cast here than as the somewhat drippy Orlando in the first play).
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There are revels and illusions, notably a fine skeletal velociraptor head, though blink and you’ll miss it. But as they fade to black, Prospero’s renunciation of book and staff brings, yes, tears to the eyes. As it always should, in tribute to Shakespeare’s coded farewell.
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