Photograph: Ellie Kurttz
Director Ellen McDougall’s inclusive take on As You Like It has a sort of ramshackle innocence and openness to it. The casting is gender neutral and the context is fluid. Shakespeare’s play has also been interwoven with bursts of contemporary text written by Travis Alabanza, and Michael Henry’s score is filled with flashes of indy, punk and pop numbers. Max Johns’ costumes feature ruffles and tunics but they are also ripped and torn and layered up with modern-day accessories. Jacques, in particular, looks as if he has stumbled back from a heavy night’s clubbing. Fun was definitely had. But how to make sense of it all?
The first half is buoyed by a lovely sense of warmth, silliness and freedom. That’s largely down to the sparkling chemistry between cousins Rosalind and Celia, who quickly decide to flee to the Forest of Arden rather than bear a life apart. Their deep friendship holds this increasingly fractured production together. When Celia all but growls to Rosalind “Thou and I are one”, there is heat and heartache behind her words.
Nina Bowers is a wonderfully flighty and flirty Rosalind, making love with the audience, an array of suitors, and just about anyone she comes across. She forms an excellent double act with Macy-Jacob Seelochan’s sharp-tongued and sensible Celia. Seelochan finds new purpose in almost all of Celia’s lines, pausing in unexpected but persistently illuminating places. Even when Seelochan is merely listening, they mesmerise, with all the undercurrents of the dialogue writ large across their every twitch of the eyes or click of the fingers.
If this were a play entirely about Rosalind and Celia it would have been a revelation, but almost all the remaining roles and relationships feel underwhelming by comparison. The subplots – particularly the painful love affair between Phoebe and Silvius – struggle to make an impression. Even the central love story between Rosalind and Orlando (Isabel Adomakoh Young) feels like a bit of an afterthought. It all makes for a deeply uneven production; a sense which is only heightened by the largely distracting interpolations of modern text and a series of faltering musical interludes. They are embellishments too far, in a show that starts with gusto but eventually fizzles out, undone by its own invention.
• At Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 29 October
