Back from a mini tour of Yorkshire and Stockport and cheering for supporting act Indignation Meeting
Theatre Review: As You Like It
There’s little to like in this Shakespearean comedy which, played relentlessly for laughs, ignores its sexual ambiguities
Playing for laughs: Lucy Phelps (Rosalind) and Amelia Donkor (Silvia) Pic: Topher McGrillis
ALISTAR FINDLAY is mesmerised by this multiple ‘Visions of Scotland’ assault on the audience’s eyes and senses
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MAYER WAKEFIELD has reservations about the direction of a play centered on a DVLA re-training session for three British-Pakistani motorists
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Peter Mitchell's photography reveals a poetic relationship with Leeds
A uncomfortably misogynistic authorial voice that sometimes seems to lack insight troubles FIONA O’CONNOR
As You Like It
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Stratford-upon-Avon
GEORGE BERNARD SHAW, no great Shakespeare fan, claimed sardonically that children would enjoy the virtue and philosophy in As You like It while adults would be delighted by the pageantry and wrestling.
Kimberley Sykes’s production, opening the new RSC season, certainly delighted an audience determined to enjoy something in these gloomy Brexit days.
Anchoring the show around the much-quoted line “All the world’s a stage,” she sets the play seemingly backstage with the action resembling a rehearsal session for an upcoming pantomime. The main prop is a costume rack from which the cast members appear to have made their own choices.
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