As You Like It (23 page)
Authors: William Shakespeare
The costuming used for many Rosalinds has actually emphasized her sexuality, as if Arden has accentuated her femininity through male disguise. Michael Billington said of Buzz Goodbody’s 1973 production:
this is a play of enormous sexual ambiguity in which man woos girl-dressed-as-boy. But any hint of sexual equivocation is knocked on the head by Eileen Atkins’s minimal attempt to disguise her femininity as Rosalind. Indeed, with her headband, fringed blouse and crutch hugging jeans, she seemed even more seductive as Ganymede than before.
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Likewise, in 1996, Niamh Cusack in her disguise as Ganymede looked, “with her long honey-gold tresses, unequivocally feminine.”
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The obviousness of Rosalind’s disguise does alter audiences’ reactions to the central relationship, as does the sense of Orlando’s awareness that Ganymede is, indeed, a girl in disguise. This awareness is often built into performances, as in 2005, when Lia Williams was
so overcome with the romping giddiness of love and with the licence granted by her male mufti that she’s always in danger of going too far. She allows, for example, a finger to rove up Orlando’s chest and it’s no surprise that the pair find themselves in a prolonged kiss, leaving [Barnaby] Kay to shore up his heterosexual credentials afterward in a very funny, dazed macho strut. In this interpretation, Rosalind is rumbled when she faints into the arms of Orlando’s brother, Oliver, who becomes aware of her breasts. It’s clear that he passes this information on to the hero, who hence emerges here as a man of great empathy and tolerance. His tacit acceptance of the trick imparts an added charge to the line: ‘I can live no longer by thinking’ and Williams’s Rosalind duly accords it the respect of a lengthy pensive silence.
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It appears that productions are more likely to fail when Rosalind suppresses her sexuality through disguise. Peter Holland commented of David Thacker’s 1992 production:
Samantha Bond’s Rosalind belonged to the tradition aptly defined by Lindsay Duguid: ‘[She] is wholesome and pert with her slightly husky actress’s voice and her gamine gestures (legs
apart, arms akimbo, hands in pockets, and so on). The English actress playing Rosalind is a gender all her own’ … If this was Rosalind in a limbo of gender it was also Rosalind without sexuality. For in a play so full of sexual desire the production saw only clichéd romance, epitomised by the long hard look between Celia and Oliver at the end of 4.3 or their rapt attention of each other in 5.4.
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From what we can glean from the wildly divergent opinions of Sophie Thompson’s exuberant performance as Rosalind in 1989, she emphasized the sexual immaturity of a young woman discovering sex for the first time:
The result is very different from the romantic heroines of yore. Her Rosalind is part waif, part tomboy, a naïve, gawky girl who can mug and fool, tickle an irritating friend, but also play purposeful games when the time comes. With that bewildered heart-throb, Flynn’s Orlando, you feel she is testing the sexual waters, readying herself for a plunge that may one day end her, as she claims, ‘fathoms deep in love’.
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The major problem in producing the play today lies not in Orlando and Rosalind, whose relationship, for all its fantastic context, seems to have an everlasting modernity, but in finding satisfactory modern equivalents for its sixteenth-century variety turns.
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In
As You Like It
“the love action is supervised by the counter-clowns Touchstone and Jaques.”
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Like many elements in the play, these two characters offer us “juxtapositions of opposites”:
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Touchstone the professional clown, and Jaques the natural melancholic, punctuate the play with opposing witticisms. Unfortunately, comedy does have a tendency to date, and Touchstone, more than most Shakespearean comic roles, does not seem to have stood the test of time. B. A. Young of the
Financial Times
, having witnessed many productions of
As You Like It
, stated: “it would take [Buster] Keaton himself to persuade me that Touchstone is funny.”
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David Tennant, who played the part in 1996, eventually discovered humor in the role, but on initial inspection of the character, he concluded:
I could see that Touchstone was supposed to be funny in terms of the structure of the play, the tone of his scenes, and the fact that everyone keeps going on about how hilarious he is. Jaques in particular, an otherwise miserable sod, when confronted with Touchstone, finds his ‘lungs began to crow like Chanticleer’ [2.7.30] and yet I could find nothing in the part to make me even smile … long speeches heavy with obscure double entendres and long tracts of cool philosophy, but nothing obviously funny.
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The actor playing Touchstone often has to resort to obvious visual gags or crude humor in order to get a laugh from the audience. In Adrian Noble’s 1985 production an onstage pool offered the inevitability of a pratfall. One reviewer commented:
5.
An initial impression of cool philosophy rather than obvious humor: David Tennant as Touchstone, with Arthur Cox as Corin, in Steven Pimlott’s 1996 production.
Worst of all … is the strip cartoon, slapstick routines provided by Nicky Henson’s Touchstone.… Henson ends up in a pool at least three times, and provides a most laboured and unfunny illustration of the ‘lie seven times removed’ speech, in which the rest of the cast are made … to join in. His routine ends with a chorus of mock farts.
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Paul Chahidi in the RSC’s 2005 production managed to make Touchstone funny, successfully engaging the audience, which he had “eating out of his hand.”
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Nevertheless, he, too, had to find humor in visual gags and asides added to what Shakespeare has supplied: “Paul Chahidi is that rarest of things, a genuinely funny Touchstone, never more entertaining than in an inspired routine when he treads in something nasty in the forest”:
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“[He] works wonders with the thankless role of Touchstone … [but] can’t resist milking his chatty relationship with front-row spectators.”
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Buzz Goodbody updated the character in an attempt to give the audience a contemporary equivalent: “Certainly the director, Buzz Goodbody, was not one for half measures. Touchstone, court-jester, became the television comedian, who has transmigrated from the music hall to the new medium.”
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In the same production (1973), modern literary references informed Richard Pasco’s widely applauded performance as Jaques. He portrayed him as “one of those hypochondriacal patients of Dr Chekhov who are in mourning for their life”:
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In a seedily smart suit, wispy-haired, fiddling with gold-rimmed spectacles, he diffuses the bulbous fragility of an alcoholic, precariously cured, whose self-disgust still expresses itself in rapid apprehension and exuberant fancy. He enriches the Ages of Man speech by making each age a self-contained antithesis, with a twist in the tail. He signals recognition of each predictable folly with a most delicate play of feature, points each deflationary line with a musical accuracy which is a joy in itself. He gives an enormously enjoyable performance, like many a Jaques before him; and like all fine rather than merely
exciting players, he expands one’s understanding of human nature.
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Because the comedy does not often work with modern audiences, directors have added an extra dimension to both Touchstone and Jaques by emphasizing their similarities rather than their differences. In 1961,
Mr Max Adrian and Mr Colin Blakely are a Jaques and a Touchstone who seem to take a genuine pleasure in each other’s company. The egoist’s wisdom, it has been said, is half fooling, as Touchstone’s fooling is half wisdom, and both seem delightedly aware of their true relations.
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In Terry Hands’ 1980 production the characters of Touchstone and Jaques ran parallel to each rather than being opposites. Derek Godfrey’s Jaques demonstrated a talent for clowning and also revealed a lustful side, showing he was equally under Arden’s influence:
a close bond develops between these two. From the moment when Derek Godfrey, instead of simply reporting his meeting with a fool in the forest, launches into his own clown routine. This being a performance show, Joe Melia’s Touchstone is a whole-time performer as much as Audrey’s balding lover as when called upon to do a turn for the Duke … Much more surprising but thoroughly in keeping with the fertility motif, Jaques is shown falling for Rosalind who half-succumbs to being folded in his cloak before her real lover arrives on the scene and the sound of youthful laughter drives Jaques back into solitude.
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In the majority of productions Jaques as the melancholic is also the outsider of the pastoral world, the world of love. In productions that emphasized “the tyrannical rule of Duke Frederick’s court as either a fascist or a communist dictatorship … Jaques was shown either as … a political dissident or a student agitator.”
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His separateness
from the other characters in the play was taken to an interesting extreme in John Caird’s 1989 production:
The whole world seemed a show put on for [Jaques’] benefit; indeed, at times he took a seat in the front of the stalls to watch the parade of folly, leaping back onto the stage at, for instance, [3.3.61] to help Touchstone get married. The bitterness of his out-of-place dignity turned his report on Touchstone into a brutal language that this Touchstone would not have used … his final comments to Touchstone [5.4.184–5] were inordinately vicious, provoking a response of genuine distress from Touchstone himself.
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The way in which Jaques was costumed and lit also added an extra dimension of sinister foreboding to the character, giving him a darkly metaphysical presence:
a suave, crisply spoken Jaques, with elegant overcoat, trilby hat, and walking cane, separating him sharply from his ragged co-mates in exile. He had an unforgettable moment as he stood still and silent upstage behind Hymen, his dark clothes lost against the background, top lighting catching his cheek-bones and giving him a startling cadaverous look for this “last scene of all.”
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Jaques is also often portrayed as a timeless figure or, indeed, like Rosalind, a character at odds with the society in which he finds himself. In 1992, Michael Siberry played
a dark, elegant, superbly spoken Jaques … a handsome, battered man in early middle age, majestically embittered and revelling in it with the relish of an exhibitionist. His revulsion at the slaughter of animals is quite genuine, which only reminds you that Shakespeare was writing for an age which found pleasure in their public torture and killing. Even Queen Elizabeth preferred bear-baiting to stage plays. Once again, the dramatist is light years ahead of his time.
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The tendency for modern productions to focus on the darker elements in the play has sometimes gone too far, draining the comedy of its humor, vitality, and passion. Steven Pimlott’s 1996 production provided
few laughs and almost no delight. Touchstone (David Tennant) works hard to make some sour humour out of Arden … Niamh Cusack plays Rosalind as if she has been told to avoid all playfulness, and Rachel Joyce as Celia declines all chances of wryness in her commentaries on the follies of lovers.
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John Woodvine, however, was praised as “a wonderfully grave, sententious Jacques whose seven-ages-of-man speech acquires unusual poignancy when he discovers that old Adam has quietly expired.”
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What is often described as Shakespeare’s most accessible and enjoyable comedy throws some decidedly difficult curves for the modern director. The frequency with which the play is revived in the modern repertoire attests to its popularity with audiences, but has resulted in very idiosyncratic approaches, turning a pleasing comedy into a melancholy tale of exile and isolation, a feminist tract, or modern psychodrama. As Penny Gay points out, “a final loss of directorial innocence … is the hallmark of most modern productions.” In our postmodern culture, directors know that there is no such thing as a simple “trust in the given material.”
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Dominic Cooke
was born in 1966 and educated at the University of Warwick. His
Arabian Nights
(1998) won a TMA/Equity Award for Best Show for Young People after it was produced at The Young Vic and on tour in 1998. He was associate director first at the Royal Court Theatre and then with the Royal Shakespeare Company, where his productions included
Cymbeline, Macbeth
, John Marston’s
The Malcontent
, the acclaimed
As You Like It
(with Lia Williams as Rosalind) that he talks about here and an equally acclaimed rendition of Arthur Miller’s
The Crucible
. He was nominated for an Evening Standard
Theatre Award in 2003 for Best Director. In 2007 he returned to the Royal Court, Britain’s leading venue for new theater writing, as artistic director.
