![]() ![]() ![]() It’s a kind of idyllic crypto-hippie play with a strong lyrical emphasis on nature which allows for wild zigzags of outcome and emotion though its defining quality is that of a free-for-all happenstance in which anything can occur (the wicked repent, lions spare sleeping heroes, grace and wild unlikelihood are part of the texture of things) where the breath of Nature may banish, at the touch of a wand, the intrinsic and all but caricatured wickedness of the world.Īnd at the centre of it all there’s Rosalind disguised as a boy who then pretends to be a girl in order to cure Orlando of his love. There’s a good duke and a bad duke, a melancholy alienate called Jaques who gives the ‘All the world’s a stage’ speech and a cynical clown Touchstone, a professional comic who keeps the girls company and amuses everybody. She brings the bounty of this talent to Simon Phillips’ Melbourne Theatre Company production at the Southbank Theatre of this version of pastoral that unfolds like the lilt of a summer’s day in the Forest of Arden to which young Orlando has fled and where he encounters Rosalind and her girlfriend Celia, though the former is dressed as a boy. The dream Twelfth Night which was underway back in 2018 with Geoffrey Rush as Malvolio, the man who ultimately cries, ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ was diminshed because Rush had to withdraw but Simon Phillips’ production remained attractive because it had Christie Whelan-Browne as Olivia and this girl with the long legs and the singer’s voice has turned out to be a born high comedienne with lightning comic timing. ![]() It’s not one of the earlier happy comedies like the verbally dazzling Love’s Labour’s Lost or the rough and tumble The Taming of the Shrew but nor does it have the pensive quality, fringed with melancholy, of that world of wind and rain in Twelfth Night, a happy comedy so late it encompasses aspects of its opposite. As You Like It is middle Shakespeare, probably lateish 1590s. ![]()
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