Performance: As You Like It: Outdoor Summer Shakespeare

Auckland University

Review: Susan Budd


Lex Matheson's production of As You Like It is an unusually straightforward take on Shakespeare's sparkling comedy.

Set in 18th-century France, the costumes are lovely and the verdant setting beneath the clock tower at Auckland University is charming, particularly with the construction of a small lake that provides ample opportunity for comic business.

Cushla Finn gives a fresh and lively performance as Rosalind, Shakespeare's most vibrant and likeable heroine.

The speed at which she takes her speeches is impressive, but rather more variation in pace would lend them more meaning.

She is well-matched by Rachelle Tomlin, whose Celia has elegance and wit.

As Orlando, Eden Phillips' irrepressible grin and athleticism in scenes of wrestling and sword-play make him the very model of a suitable suitor.

In the role of his elder brother, Oliver, Richard Thompson makes the leap from tyrant to gentle lover with elan.

Among the other pairs of lovers, Andi Reveley shines as a delightfully fiery Phebe, who deserves better than Justin Westgate's nerdish Silvius.

Matthew Gillanders portrays Jaques as an angst-ridden Goth rather than a detached ironist.

He is bitterly angry at the love play surrounding him, in which he is unable to join because, to judge by a violent rash he displays, he suffers from a venereal disease.

However, Jaques derives some sort of solace from the company of two sapphic ladies whose dress is more Biba of the 1970s than wasde rigueur in pre-revolutionary France.

A rather odd prologue has been inserted in which Jaques capers as the ghost at a jolly picnic, and the brief Scene II in Act 4, in which a slain deer's horns are regarded, in jest, as a symbol of cuckoldry has been expanded into a dark druidic rite.

Both scenes sit uneasily between the grim machinations of Duke Frederick's gloomy court and the frolics in the forest of Arden, Duke senior's pastoral exile. As with the characterisation of Jaques, they cast too heavy a shadow over the comedy.

The final scene of Hymen's revels, in which the cast joins in the courtly dance, provides, however, a delightfully fitting conclusion to the play.