Review by Peter King
A shabby, concrete world teeming with asylum seekers was the starting point for a mesmerising new take on Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy about a girl who is banished from her homeland by a usurping tyrant.
The menacing machinery of a modern police state – the chilling sounds of whirring helicopter blades, fluorescent lights, dogs barking and emergency sirens – put a contemporary gloss on Tudor terror.
Yet, merriment mingled with menace – and a cast drawn from the four corners of Europe beguiled the audience with a beautifully expressive and balletic version of the triumph of humanity in the Forest of Arden.
One phrase spawned in print by the play is “too much of a good thing” – and this production proved that you cannot have too much of that.
From the moment when the actor playing Adam (Fisayo Akinade) explained that he was teaching himself English by studying “All the world’s a stage”, the spectators willed him to transport them into a reinvention of the Shakespeare tale presented as a play within a play by refugees with nothing to call their own but a mattress and a suitcase.
Confidently straddling the play’s two camps, Mark Jax was explosive as the sinister dictator, Duke Frederick, in grey suit, shades and open-necked shirt, and movingly human as he sat cross-legged on the floor as Jaques to deliver the comedy’s most famous lines.
A smoking Rosalind (Elisabet Johannesdottir) in a black leather jacket and jeans was already a tomboy before her transformation in the forest and the delivery of the lines by Celia (Anna Elijasz) would put many native English speakers in the role to shame.
There were delightful surprises as the play seamlessly shifted from aggressive to comedic, punctuated by shadows and pauses. Poetry trees sprouted up, Touchstone (Colin Michael Carmichael) was transformed into a shaggy Hymen and there was a magic moment when the cast turned and walked with one mind to the back of the stage.
Bowled over by what she described as arguably the best Shakespeare she had seen in years school play director and Ink pellet contributor Alison Clayton delivered a note backstage to the company at the end: “You are – all of you – in every respect brilliant. Thank you so much for a compelling and thought-provoking production.”
An educational resource on the making of the project is available at www.transport-theatre.eu/asyoulikeit