As You Like It Belvoir presents As You Like It By WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE Director EAMON FLACK Belvoir’s production of As You Like It opened at Belvoir St Theatre on Wednesday 23 November 2011. Set Designer ALISTAIR WATTS Costume Designer MEL PAGE Lighting Designer DAMIEN COOPER Assistant Lighting Designer CHRISTOPHER PAGE Composer & Sound Designer STEFAN GREGORY Assistant Director FRANK MAINOO Stage Manager CHRIS BAGLOT Assistant Stage Manager MEL DYER With Rosalind ALISON BELL Duke Frederick & Jaques BILLE BROWN Corin, Phoebe & others GARETH DAVIES Audrey, Hymen & others CASEY DONOVAN Touchstone CHARLIE GARBER Adam & Duke Senior TREVOR JAMIESON Silvius & others SHELLY LAUMAN Oliver & others HAMISH MICHAEL Violinist DAN RUSSELL Celia YAEL STONE Jaques de Boys TIM WALTER (occasionally EAMON FLACK) Orlando ASHLEY ZUKERMAN PRODUCTION THANKS Emma Saunders, Courtney Wilson Casey Donovan PhotoGraphy Heidrun Löhr YaelB Stone DESIGN Alphabet Studio 1 Director’s Note Eamon Flack As You Like It is a wonderful platypus than they acted. Shakespeare wrote of a play – all odds and ends and everything for them, and in As You unlikelihoods. After a Hamlet-like Like It he gives them unusual licence opening replete with intrigue and to show off their shtick; at times self-annihilation it spills into a forest it feels as much a themed variety (!) in which in the chief activity and show as a play. But as so often with only unifying dramatic device is to Shakespeare the theatrical practicality wander about with nothing much to is also the magic: As You Like It has do and accidentally cross paths with a free-spirited breadth of life and other people who are also wandering performance which verges on the about with nothing much to do. magnificent. There’s something beguilingly vague One argument, and a good one, has about the whole enterprise, and yet it it that the play was premiered on manages to be, in a curiously gentle Shrove Tuesday in 1599 at a private way, a play about everything. party of Elizabethan elite. It took § place in a hall at Richmond Palace, a large estate with an impressive deer It was probably written in 1599 park just outside London. In its first – though we can’t say for sure – instance, then, As You Like It was a which was probably the same year show about a bunch of city people Shakespeare wrote Hamlet – which visiting a pastoral realm of bucolic we also can’t say for sure. If you’d contemplation, performed for a bunch been alive in 1599 you’d most likely of city people visiting a pastoral have been short, damp, cold, ill-fed, realm of bucolic contemplation. This roughly dressed, a long way from the kind of ironic mirroring is typical of top, and near death. Quite different Shakespeare, and it goes some way to Sydney, then, which, on a good towards explaining the play’s strange day, is the top – just so many tall, jokes (eg Touchstone’s pancakes) and dry, stylish people swooping through peculiar set pieces (eg the courtier sunshine and refusing ever to die. We and the shepherd philosophising). But are unimaginable to the Elizabethans. if we can guess at a few instances We know that Shakespeare wrote of original meaning like these, how the play – in a hurry, it seems – for his much remains unguessed at? own company of actors. We call them How much of the play’s meaning actors but they also sang, danced, remains locked up in the inscrutable improvised and played instruments, private life of its delicately coded and they did so famously. A visiting web of allegiances, in-jokes, private Frenchman thought that perhaps they mockeries, religious sympathies and even did these other things better unbidden desires? 02 Eamon Flack03 In short, like the enigmatic It wasn’t exactly Arden all over, and and history unpredictable, and the Or is the good life something that platypus, this play is the product usually very much bloodier, but age-old consolations of family and must be newly invented by each of an eccentric, very particular and these various pursuits of a new order community, of the routines of the generation? now-vanished environment. The did set the stage for several hundred life-cycle, and of the dignity of labour Is there a greater good? wellsprings of its gloriously peculiar years of apparently unlimited are struggling to retain their hitherto qualities are unknowable now. progress. The fabulous result is that perennial enchantment. In other How hopelessly might we love? They are as lost to us as the voice we – at least we in the West – are words, Arden’s work is never done How boldly might we defend against of the first person to play Rosalind now dry, well lit, cleanly dressed, any more than history will ever come wrong? (possibly a young man named quite fat, a little under the weather, to an end. Alexander Cooke). Some of the play and enjoying unprecedented How joyfully might we celebrate life? Right now, in the midst of the is now unreconstructable, some of material luxury – a far cry from our all the millennial panic of late Arden seems to be predicated it is anachronistic, and some of it is Elizabethan forbears. We live in a modernity, Arden has a lot to offer. upon seeking and trying out complete nonsense. kind of Arden, I suppose. Shakespeare’s bare stage is a little answers to these questions. And yet there is something still very So is there still a need for like Hong Kong’s off-shore casino Arden is Shakespeare’s practical alive at the centre of it. It feels as Shakespeare’s forest/stage? In our ships – a kind of circumventing experiment in the many varieties though, faced with the sudden task own times, at the very moment mechanism. Its wondrous ability both of passing meaningful time. Arden of coming up with a new play for the best of all possible economic to recall a golden age of yore and to is a celebration of the breadth of Shrove Tuesday at Richmond Palace, systems was poised to export its imagine a better future is particularly human life. This play is an invitation to Shakespeare found himself pondering benefits the whole globe over (yeah tempting nowadays. It’s an invitation multiply the possibilities. It is, after all, the basic question of his craft: how right), we suddenly find ourselves to think beyond the usual bounds called As You Like It. on earth, in the midst of the daily with an unprecedented case of of inadequate reason. Faced with upheaval of Elizabethan life, do you historical vertigo: don’t look down, the ridiculous, the bizarre and the fill a bare stage with several hours of don’t look down – the only way seemingly impossible, Arden asks entertaining and meaningful action? on is up. We now face an almost us to look at the world with a kind Being a practical man of the theatre, unbelievable set of marauding of Quixotic helpfulness – to make his solution was simply to call his gorgons which seem to call into tremendous offers and entertain bare stage the Forest of Arden and to question the fundamental enterprise every possibility with the profound sub-contract his own dilemma out to of our society. No matter which part seriousness of a child playing. But his characters: faced with an empty of the raging ideological continuum the variegated oddity and other- space and un-kept time, what would you’re on – whether your nightmare mindedness of Shakespeare’s forest- you do? If you were given the chance scenario is climate change or gay stage isn’t just a sweet distraction, it’s to begin from scratch, what kind of marriage – the common whisper a kind of invigorating moral challenge: life and living would you pursue? is that it’s all up for grabs and if to pursue some form of a good life – § we don’t get it right this time we’ll not in the sense of wine and cheese, be sorry. Our faith in our great though that’s part of the deal, no In the 412 years since 1599 that institutions is flagging: politics has doubt, but in a more essential way: question has been asked and become a pissing competition What is a good life? answered in many ways: England – no great comfort there. As for chopped off its King’s head and economics, it recalls, for me, the Is it the same for young and old, for ruled by parliament, the Jacobins sententious and sinister dogma of women and men, for black and white, annihilated old France with the Terror, the Catholicism I grew up under, and for rich and poor? the American colonies declared I can’t bring myself to subscribe to Are there timeless human virtues? themselves a federated republic, 11 either kind of heaven – God’s or Wall convict ships settled Port Jackson… Street’s. Science remains amoral 04 05 Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. Michel Eyquem de Montaigne 6 7 How happy is he born or taught Or vice; who never understood * That serveth not another’s will; How deepest wounds are A Man’s Nature is best Whose armour is his honest thought, given with praise; And silly truth his highest skill! Nor rules of state, but rules of good; perceived in Privatenesse, Whose passions not his masters are, Who God doth late and early pray for there is no Affectation; in Whose soul is still prepared for death; More of his grace than gifts to lend; Untied unto the world with care Who entertains the harmless day Passion, for that putteth a Man Of princely love or vulgar breath; With a well-chosen book or friend; out of his Precepts; And in a Who hath his life from rumours freed, – This man is free from servile bands Whose conscience is his strong retreat; Of hope to rise, or fear to fall; new Case or Experiment, for Whose state can neither flatterers feed, Lord of himself, though not of lands; there Custome leaveth him.