Theatre review: As You Like It (Shakespeare's Globe)

After a very dodgy start this summer's season at Shakespeare's Globe has significantly improved, and it ends with one of my favourite Shakespearean comedies - one of the least coherent plots, but a jumble of confusions and setpieces that can respond well to just embracing the chaos. So where I was a bit disappointed that last year's Western Romeo and Juliet didn't do anything with the high concept beyond the visuals, Sean Holmes, who this time co-directs with Charlie Josephine, gets better results with a loosely-applied setting for As You Like It. That setting is Regency, and Paul Wills' costumes provide some stunning visuals, some... interesting character choices as well as a few good gags of their own. Also coming over from last year's season is Lola Shalam, and Holmes' confidence in her to step up from Juliet to Shakespeare's biggest female lead is well-placed.

Shalam is Rosalind, awkwardly placed at a court that used to be ruled by her father but has now been usurped by her uncle (both played by Colm Gormley,) until the latter runs out of patience and has her banished to the nearby forest, where Rosalind takes on a male identity for her own safety.

This backfires when she bumps into Orlando (Josephine,) another banished noble she'd recently fallen in love with at first sight. In order to try and keep up the flirtation with him while maintaining her disguise, she comes up with a plan that, as her cousin Celia's (Gracie Oddie-James) reactions really should make her realise, is really, really terrible, and ends up in a quadruple wedding involving her and Celia marrying Orlando and his brother Oliver (Thomas Josling,) plus two more broadly comic couples.

Lumbered with a verbose Robert Armin fool, Jonnie Broadbent gets away with Touchstone basically by acknowledging the fact that 400-year-old topical puns are a hard sell and thanking the audience for just going along with it; why he's dressed as a big baby is probably best not looked into too hard. My favourite visual gag was Celia going full Little Bo Peep for her attempt to fit in as a shepherdess.

If the costumes deliver comedy the other big visual conceit offers huge amounts of charm: The dry, soulless court of Duke Frederick is full of pomp and circumstance in the outfits but their colours are up against a literal blank canvas. As the scenes move into the forest the cast and crew start to paint trees onto them, gradually adding leaves and eventually flowers. If Twelfth Night is autumnal and The Winter's Tale and A Midsummer Night's Dream are fairly self-explanatory, As You Like It is spring, and the blossoming from dead branches into colour is really effectively done. If there's a third big theme it's in Katie Richardson's music, with even more of the lines than usual being turned into songs, building on the idea of this as a proto-musical.

The production does a good job of integrating the secondary couples of Silvius (Busa Wickramasuriya) and Phoebe (Molly Madigan) along with Touchstone and Audrey (Phoebe Naughton) considering how late in the day Shakespeare remembers to introduce them, and even the very brief appearance by Audrey's other suitor William (Jurell Carter) becomes memorable when a combative Touchstone gets more than he bargained for. Meanwhile there's a nice twist in making Jaques (Katherine Pearce) another woman in male disguise, giving a fresh explanation for her outsider status and making her a kindred spirit to Rosalind.

There's a lot going right here but at the centre of it all is Shalam stepping up to the challenge - her bobbed wig as Ganymede even helps her seem like a young Judi Dench in the sense of awkwardness with a steely underside she brings to Rosalind. While I still hope this season's over-reliance on the more obviously crowd-pleasing comedies is a blip and not what we're going to get every summer, Holmes and Josephine's production proves why As You Like It so easily fits into that category.

As You Like It by William Shakespeare is booking in repertory until the 25th of October at Shakespeare's Globe.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Marc Brenner.