Review: As You Like It, Clwyd Theatr Cymru. Directed by Terry Hands

After thirty hours without food and two nights without sleep (thanks to a stomach bug), I wasn’t in great shape to see Clwyd Theatr Cymru’s As You Like It. I was rotten. The play was superb.

An immensely strong cast was led by Hedydd Dylan and Alex Felton. He played Orlando with unforced charm and humour while she was captivating as Rosalind. Feisty, playful and vibrant, she is a natural comic actor and was last year a storming Katerina in Theatr Clwyd’s Taming of the Shrew, (also directed by Terry Hands). Dylan and Felton were well supported by a brilliant cast.

Philip Bretherton as Jacques delivered the ‘seven ages’ speech with restrained and angry contempt, physically apart on stage as he was emotionally isolated from the Duke and his companions. Another notable performance was by Christian Patterson as increasingly dishevelled and lecherous Touchstone, while hilarious late cameos were added by Katie Elin-Salt as Phoebe and Elin Phillips as Audrey.

The sets and staging at Theatr Clwyd are invariably impressive. As You Like It was starkly minimalist. Gaunt, black vertical trunks created the Forest of Arden but clever use of lighting conveyed magical effects of moonlight and sunrise – and with only sparse additional scenery and a shower of fluttering golden foil the play ended with a wonderfully evoked pastoral. Clwyd Theatr Cymru is based in Mold, its associate actors almost all Welsh. With only two cast members born outside Wales the production has a rich and pleasing regional flavour, broader accents used to huge comic effect.

When so many Welsh cultural institutions are based in the south, we are privileged to have a gem like Theatr Clwyd in the north. We are also fantastically lucky that for the last fifteen years Terry Hands has been its Director. He brings huge intelligence, insight and flair to his work and almost never fails to deliver top quality productions. I was once slightly underwhelmed by his staging of Under Milk Wood, but that was in 2000, so perhaps he hadn’t yet hit full stride. As You Like It is another amongst his many triumphs.

On leaving the theatre I was told by a friend I looked considerably better at the end of the evening than at its beginning – yet more proof of the regenerative power of art. I went home. As You Like It travels to Swansea and Cardiff in March. South Wales will love it. Good health or bad.

William Shakespeare: A class act

The English are a curious breed. We pretend to love peace but seem to be forever at war. We invented most sports but are hopeless at playing them. We laugh at the monarchy but wouldn’t contemplate an alternative. We benefit from immigration, yet fear and loathe immigrants. We produce pioneering scientists yet take no interest in science. And we take pride in our extraordinary artistic tradition but find artists troubling and inconvenient. We like them to be romantic but favour them dead. Best of all, we prefer them romantic and dead.

That is Shakespeare’s problem. Although unquestionably dead, he is resolutely unromantic. That is why so many scholars have wasted their dreary academic lives trying to prove

that the plays attributed to William Shakespeare weren’t written by him but by the Earl of Oxford, or Francis Bacon, or even Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. It is also presumably why Robert Emmerich felt the need to waste millions of pounds making Anonymous – though fortunately few people have felt the need to go and see it.

 

In part, the insistence that the author of Henry V, King Lear or Hamlet had to be an aristocrat was driven by a belief that a playwright whose work inhabited the minds of kings and explored the world of power had necessarily to belong to an elite caste. This of course rather misses the point that imagination can do whatever it chooses, conjure what it will.

 

There was almost certainly another impulse behind the need to prove Shakespeare of noble blood: snobbery. This seems to have characterised Thomas Looney, first proponent of the notion that Shakespeare’s plays were written by Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. Aptly named, Looney appears to have been an obsessive reactionary who hated the modern world, loathed democracy and hoped England might return to its feudal past.

Despite the Earl of Oxford having died in 1604, ten years before Shakespeare’s last play, Looney’s theory was taken up by others. For while most of the greats of English literature such as Samuel Jonson, John Keats or Charles Dickens have come from lower middle class backgrounds, most academics and commentators have come from a stuffier, more privileged milieu.

 

Frankly, they deplored the notion that England’s supreme writer should have been a tradesman’s son and the product of a provincial grammar school. Christopher Marlowe was a drunken, violent, atheistic homosexual, but at least he had been to Cambridge; he was part of the establishment. For these sniffy, cloistered snobs the thought that Shakespeare might have spoken with a flat midlands accent was too much to contemplate.

 

We know relatively little about his life, but almost everything we do know suggests he was pragmatic and calculating; a businessman as much as a poet. To all appearances, Shakespeare was an upwardly mobile entrepreneur who saw the theatre as a good way to make money.

This was always going to upset some people. We prefer our artists to die young and in poverty. Keats had the good taste to die of a writerly disease, poor and at a young age in tasteful Italy.

Without seeming to care that it would upset snobs, aesthetes and others of refined palate, Shakespeare chose to end his days in a comfortable bed with a small fortune under the mattress. Good for him.