Shakespeare’s tale tells of exiled aristo Rosalind who, with her cousin and best friend Celia, daughter of the brother who usurped Rosalind’s dad’s dukedom, flee disguised as a boy and a country girl to the forest where Rosalind’s father and his followers are already living. There they encounter Orlando, the lovely lad Rosalind has already fallen for, who is posting poems in her praise on the trees of the forest. In her disguise as Ganymede, she now gives Orlando lessons in loving, while rustic girl Phoebe falls in love with counterfeit Ganymede.
Shakespeare is already exploring gender identity through these and other relationships in the play, and director Ellen McDougall has made her production a celebration of gender and sexual diversity. It isn’t just a matter of gender-blind casting: this is a production that queers Arden.
Unlike some recent productions, it doesn’t hide the Globe stage’s Elizabethan façade, and Max John’s costume design plays eclectic variations (frequently flesh revealing) on Elizabethan doublet, breeches and hose, while above the yard, messages are spelt out like flags on a washing line saying such as, “there are more species of love than you know.”
As the evening progresses, these exiles aren’t so much camped out in the woodland as camping it up at a gay fest. Duke Senior and his flamboyant fellows seem ever-ready to break into a song, a dance or some vogueing with new songs replacing Shakespeare’s. The text has been tweaked with additions by Travis Alabanza: there’s a brief prologue, excisions, inserts and, towards the end, Rosalind simplifies the plot and avoids an over-long night by suggesting, “let’s just go to the next scene”.
There is an easy rapport with the audience: not just a clap-along but help for Orlando in composing his verses to Rosalind, while the girls pinch a baseball cap from an audience member to make them look poorer. Early on, putting Orlando’s wrestling match in the yard makes it up close for some, but its placing means quite a lot of the audience aren’t able to see it, which is a pity for it is a clever piece of slightly slo-mo miming.
This is not a production for academic purists or those who expect a “traditional” production (whatever that is), but it is liberating and funny and a packed audience loved it.
Isabel Adomakoh Young’s rather modest, engaging Orlando spurts a tuft of a beard and a codpiece to clearly identify the character’s gender; some of the others are more fluid. Macy-Jacob Seelochan’s Celia also seem a bit besotted with Rosalind, but seems to end happily paired off with Orlando’s brother. Though at first it is she who should seems more forceful, but freed by the forest and perhaps emboldened by a painted-on moustache, Nina Bowers’s Rosalind finds plenty of confidence. They are a trio who work well together, not least in nice little touches, such as Ganymede / Rosalind tugging Orlando along by the locket she gave him just after seeing him wrestle.
For the rest, the strength lies in ensemble work full of strutting energy rather than great acting, but there is a touching performance from Stephanie Jacob as Orlando’s elderly servingman Adam and Alex Austin, playing a bare-legged, bare-midriffed, camp Jacques with a far from upper-class accent, makes one of Shakespeare’s most familiar speeches sound brand new. His people’s philosopher is more caustic than melancholic.
When Emmanuel Akwafo’s Hymen draws thing to a close welcoming the audience to join the Globe’s company’s queer family, it isn’t quite the end—but Rosalind doesn’t deliver Shakespeare’s epilogue; instead, there is something more enigmatic. Like the whole production, some may find it perversely subversive, but no one can deny that it makes a triumphantly positive statement about accepting diversity and celebrating the sharing of love.