The play opens with an impassioned argument between the two brothers Orlando, the peoples’ hero, and the stuffy, pompous Oliver.

Orlando is railing against his brother whose responsibility it was to give his younger brother a proper education, and learn him in the ways of gentlemanliness and propriety.

A tale of liberty and banishment

As it is, Oliver reveals that the people hold Orlando in higher esteem, and that the younger brother is nevertheless learned and gentle as befits his birth rather than his upbringing.

At the same time, Rosalind is lamenting her woes to her cousin Celia whose father has banished her own father.

She, in time, is banished also, as Orlando is advised to leave the town for his own safety, and thus begins a sequence of deceptions woven around different stories of jealousy, of love, of passion and of wooing.

Even the marvellous and familiar Touchstone finds some excitement of his own in the form of the almost show stealing Amanda Horlock as cow-eyed Phebe.

As the bereft lover wandering the forest, pinning bad verse to trees with a dewy eye, Rupert Ward Lewis is superb.

And Saskia Portway was as generous to us with her Rosalind as Shakespeare was to that particular part.

As the young man Ganymede, Rosalind can rail against womankind and against love, but can also display all the passions and wiles of the fairer sex.

It must be a role actresses dream of playing, and Portway didn’t let us down.

Neither did her long suffering cousin Celia for that matter: Rebecca Smart had a lot of time on stage where she wasn’t speaking, but she managed neither to fill the space too vigorously nor to disappear into the background.

Light and sound

Lighting was wisely used to give us court and forest, but more effective by far was the use of music and sound.

Loud clashes brought us with a start from forest idyll to raging Duke, cursing the loss of his daughter and Fool.

And, best by a long shot, were scenes of frolicking and frivolity with deliciously harmonious singing – well done those lone voices, heavenly.

For me, though, the play was made by John Mackay’s languorous and sublimely gloomy Jaques.

Who better than this tall, sloping character to bring us "All the world’s a stage," and other such gems?

Hot stuff

When the Tobacco Factory theatre was at its hottest (and it did get pretty toasty, making the interval seem like it mightn’t arrive in time), there was Jaques, sparring with some lovelorn unfortunate or other, revelling in his melancholy, "I can suck melancholy out of a song as a weasel sucks eggs."

If I was going to complain, I might confess to being slightly irked by one too many fluffed lines (though my reason says be kind, all this after all that Troilus and Cressida, but these are professionals).

And the clack of shoes on the bare boards very occasionally rose above voices and broke the atmosphere.

But these are perhaps the complaints of a pedant who finds herself thoroughly spoilt.

I came out of Troilus and Cressida thinking that all previously heaped praise seemed false and that I would never be able to sit through another performance of anything, ever.

But I was – and as long as the performance is by these players in that space, I shan’t mind!