As You Like It
Rough Magic Prod
Adelaide Botanic Garden
Until Sat 15 March



'As You Like It' may not be up there in most people's minds with 'Hamlet' and 'Romeo & Juliet' as one of Shakespeare's most celebrated plays, but it does include some of those ever-quotable lines, like "all the world's a stage" and the bit about the seven ages of man. It also shows off some of Will's favourite plot points: disinherited characters, sudden love affairs, and girls dressing as boys for vaguely articulated reasons.

I've never been too fond of that sort of thing, really, and it seems more nonsensical in this play than in others, but this is not the forum to bash the Bard. The real question is: does the Rough Magic troop put on a decent production? And mostly, the answer is yes. The cast seize onto their roles with vigour and humour, managing the sometimes-difficult task of getting genuine laughs from 400-year old language. The performances are quite broad, even for a comedy, but a similar enthusiasm comes across very well in the romantic moments and one exciting fight scene. That it's all done with minimal staging in the Botanic adds a lot.

One thing that niggled at me was the addition of overtly modern touches: Oliver, Orlando's brother, is a golf-club toting yuppie, the Duke's servant has a mobile phone and earpiece, and so on. These never have any impact on the storytelling, and so their presence seems rather pretentious. A lot of effort was put into the costumes; why not play them straight? I also think that some of the extraneous subplots could have been trimmed for time's sake, but you can't really blame a theatre company for sticking to the script.

Henry Nicholls