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Ranging
from the controversial Cuckoos in which a couple become embarrassingly
inseparable following a sex act, to the fey abandon of the ménage
a trois featured in Noel Coward's Design
For Living, all have been engaging and worthy in their separate
examinations of the power of love and the nature of physical attraction.
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Joseph
Millson "excellently" plays Orlando |
In
As You Like It, the theme is not so much love perhaps, as its close
relationship to folly.
Characters
are struck dumb by beauty, pin notes on trees professing their undying
passion and urge others to write declamatory letters avowing publicly
their deepest infatuations.
Moreover,
it would not be a Shakespearean comedy without a good deal of cross-dressing
and women (played by men anyway, in the original productions, of
course) pretending to be men, before metamorphosing back into women
and marrying their heroes.
Yet
there are darker, more problematical elements at work in this play
- as in Measure For Measure - which renders it difficult to fit
into the regular Shakespearean template.
The
banishments and squabbles are of a deeper, more consequential tenor
than other contemporary works and the rift between forest - the
"desert inaccessible" - and court, more profound than the standard
juxtaposition.
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| Michael
Sibbery (left) plays the engaging clown Touchstone |
Sir
Peter has assembled a fine, versatile cast which includes the veteran
comic Eric Sykes, who doubles as the loyal servant Adam and the
drunken buffoon of a clergyman, Sir Oliver Mar-Text.
Sykes
may now be a deaf octogenarian, who stumbles through several of
his lines, but nevertheless, he has a comic timing and delivery
that has been brilliantly honed after an apparent lifetime of performing.
Rebecca
Hall took some time to make her mark on the principal female character
of Rosalind, being a little staid and unsettling in the initial
acts.
By
the end, however, she had warmed to the role and gave a bravura
performance, ably counterpointed by the rather smaller, though no
less imposing, Rebecca Callard as her sidekick, Celia.
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Joseph
Millson as Orlando |
Rosalind's
male counterpart, Orlando, is also excellently played by the engaging
Joseph Millson.
The
magnificent set, designed by John Gunter, is a delight, ranging,
as it does, from the sparse - if not actually downright bare - at
the play's outset, to the fully-equipped forest of the pastoral
idyll.
Final
honours however, go to the superb Michael Siberry as the engaging
clown Touchstone and Philip Voss as the melancholic Jaques, to whom
befalls the honour of the celebrated "All the world's a stage" soliloquy
- that mantra which, in its Latinised form - Totus Mondus Agit Histrionem
– boldly emblazoned on a lintel above the entrance, greeted visitors
to the original Globe Theatre in Southwark.
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Philip
Voss as the melancholic Jaques |
Philip
Voss, in his wonderfully contemplative rendition of the speech,
managed to find new depths and meaning to what could easily become
a tired set piece.
This
has been a fine, well-supported season for the Bath Theatre Royal
which continues to maintain and enhance its reputation as among
the forefront of Britain's provincial theatres.
>>>
The Peter Hall Company: As You Like It by William Shakespeare runs
at the Theatre
Royal Bath until Saturday 30 August
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