To distill As You Like It’s focus in its purest form is inevitably to talk of love. Love’s delightfully irrational force interrupts this play’s central thrust before it even has a valid reason to do so, when our depressed heroine Rosalind, simply looking for “sport” to make her merry, asks Celia, “what think you of falling in love?” She has no object of love yet and seemingly no likelihood of attaining one, but love in this play will find a way no matter what the disguise, barrier or probability.
“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
Season Cast
The Court | |
Duchess of the Court | Bernadette Ryan |
Oliver de Bois | Nick Willis |
Jacques de Bois | Eric Beecroft |
Orlando de Bois | Christopher Stalley |
Adam | Barry French |
Rosalind | Lizzie Schebesta |
Celia | Eloise Winestock |
Touchstone | Troy Carlson |
Charles the Wrestler | Christopher Tomkinson |
Charles' Wife | Naomi Livingston |
Sisters Le Beau | Allin Vartan-Boghossian |
Gretel Maltabarow | |
Court Ensemble | All Cast |
Exiled Forest Court | |
Duke of the Forest | Christopher Tomkinson |
Jaques | James Lugton |
Amiens | Naomi Livingston |
Drew Livingston | |
Foresters | Eirc Beecroft |
Takaya Honda | |
Gretel Maltabarow | |
Allin Vartan-Boghossian | |
Alison Carlson | |
Bernadette Ryan | |
Abigail Austin | |
Nick Willis | |
Forest Musicians | Mary Rapp |
Pip Dracakis | |
Jessica Clay | |
Sally Andrews | |
Drew Livingston | |
Naomi Livingston | |
Forest of Arden Locals | |
Corin | Terry Karabelas |
Audrey | Alison Carlson |
Silvius | Yalin Ozucelik |
Phoebe | Abigail Austin |
Sir Oliver Martext | Barry French |
Season Crew
Director | Damien Ryan | |
Costume Design | Anna Gardiner | |
Original Scores and Music Direction | Drew Livingston | |
Naomi Livingston | ||
Lighting Design | Liam Fraser | |
Wrestle Choreography | Kyle Rowling | |
Dance Choreography | Lizzie Schebesta | |
Naomi Livingston | ||
Eloise Winestock | ||
Art and Design Manager | Terry Karabelas | |
Photographer | Seiya Taguchi | |
Program and Art Design | Seiya Taguchi | |
Tegan Hendel | ||
Scenic Construction | Barry French | |
Film and Visual Identity Promo | David Stalley | |
John Karabelas | ||
Takaya Honda | ||
Festivals Coordinator | Oliver Burton | |
Stage Manager | Sarah Ryan | Sydney Hills Shakespeare in the Park |
Sarah Ryan | The Leura Shakespeare Festival | |
Kelly Ukena | Shakespeare in the Gardens | |
Production Manager | Kelly Ukena | Shakespeare in the Gardens |
Assistant Stage Manager | Sarah Ryan | Shakespeare in the Gardens |
Festival Crew | Oliver Wells | |
Patrick Morrow | ||
James Winestock | ||
Amie McNee | ||
Cassandra Jones | ||
Katy Willis | ||
Caroline Langley | ||
Charlie jones | ||
Robbie McNeil | ||
Festival Co-ordinator | Oliver Burton | |
Finance Director | Gai Strouthos | |
Producer | Gordon Stalley | |
Production Management | Christopher Tomkinson | |
James Lugton |