Versailles-Styled As You Like It Wows With Comedy
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- Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine co-direct a production of As You Like It with Duke Frederick's court styled after Louis XVI's Versailles, featuring flamboyant Molière-style gesticulations and progressively plainer costumes in the forest.
- Lola Shalam stars as Rosalind opposite Gracie Oddie-James as Celia; both shed enormous wigs and bustles upon entering Arden, with Shalam becoming Ganymede in simple yokel garb while Oddie-James remains in an exaggerated Little Bo Peep costume as Aliena.
- Charlie Josephine also plays Orlando with an estuary accent marking his lowly status, contrasting with the aristocratic accent and dress of Rosalind and Celia to delineate class without overstatement.
- Paul Wills's set design uses whiteboard backdrops onto which trees are drawn and progressively colored in to bloom, paired with Katie Richardson's folksy musical arrangements of Shakespeare's songs and occasional audience sing-alongs.
- Jonnie Broadbent plays a bare-chested Touchstone in a lacy ruff as a comic highlight, Katherine Pearce's Jaques delivers "All the world's a stage" as quietly moving, and Colm Gormley plays both Duke Frederick and Duke Senior.
- The production's hearty comic merriment comes at the cost of the play's subversive edges — including same-sex infatuation between Orlando and Ganymede and Duke Senior's alternative model for living — which the reviewer says feel "a little lost among the fun."
Why it matters: Josephine's gender-fluid casting (playing Orlando) and a Versailles court conceit show how far this pastoral comedy can be pushed aesthetically, but the review's central trade-off is explicit: sacrificing the play's queer undercurrents and exile-as-alternative-society politics for broad laughs leaves Shakespeare a "weirdly fresh" romp rather than a risky one — a tension any director tackling this script must now weigh.
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