“Love is merely a madness”

And so a violent plot about bitter brotherly disputes is hijacked from that moment by such a tangle of love affairs and infatuations that only a god can clean up its exquisite mess, offering in the process, irrefutable and highly optimistic proof that love is a very real, and deeply good, thing.

But Shakespeare’s vision of love is not generalized. This joyous comedy, at its heart, targets the many different forms of love that define our most significant human relationships and he explores love both as a positive, curative force, and a disease from which we suffer. Each character’s story offers a unique prism through which to view ‘love’ -- its vagaries, its agonies and waywardness, its transcendent joys, its “sighs and tears”, its “passion and purity”, its loyalty, its libidinal urges, its spontaneity, its risk and rewards, and above all, its optimism.

But how can anyone say anything ‘new’ about love? Shakespeare’s solution is to mock what has been said before, and his characters do this mercilessly in As You Like It. The play may end with ‘perfect’ love, but it is parodied and ridiculed on its way there. For Jaques, a love song is inevitably a “woeful ballad made to his mistress eyebrow”. Orlando’s heartfelt rhymes are dismissed as “tedious homilies of love” and even turned into dirty jokes by a fool, and his protestations of his willingness to “die” for love are met with Rosalind’s frank and realistic response that “men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love”. That and many other conventional balloons of love are viciously burst in this play.

So we approached the play, primarily through its astonishing heroine Rosalind, as the story of an education – she strives to teach us of a love that goes beyond pretence, convention and superficiality. She does not disparage love or passion – why would she, she is ‘in’ it herself – but she wants Orlando, Phoebe, Silvius and anyone else willing to listen, to recognise our idealised, mythologised visions of love as unrealistic and misleading. For her, heroes like Leander did not die for love but “being taken with a cramp...drown’d”. It is the false artifice of love she wants to cure in us, replacing it with the reality of what it will be like to live with and love a real woman, who will have, “for every passion something, and for no passion, truly anything”. But it is not an intellectual game she is playing as Ganymede. Driving her education of Orlando is the simple, heartfelt need of a girl to test whether the boy who claims he loves her, really does.

Shakespeare does not attempt to sever sex from love in this play either. Rosalind’s desire for Orlando is as physical as it is emotional, “come, woo me, woo me, for now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent.” Her boyish disguise is liberating her spirit and her sexuality in a spectrum that crosses between hetero and homoeroticism quite freely.

In the end, the play seems to ask us to believe in the profound truth of love, as a delight, a surprise, a choice and a responsibility. It gives us romantic ‘true’ love, poetic conventional love, unrequited love, exploitative lust, homoerotic impulses, ‘sisterly’ love, the painful journey to brotherly love, and not least, the unconditional love of an old man for his young master. In the process it gives us a series of roles that actor’s love to play and this, along with Drew and Naomi’s exquisite original music score and Anna’s playfully beautiful costumes, has been the greatest joy for us in the rehearsal room