Shenanigans aplenty at Pop-up
Popular culture and folk music collide amid the buffoonery
The Pop-up Globe is back! Looking a touch more refined amid the Ellerslie Racecourse flower beds, the venture retains its informal vibe with scaffold towers marking out the dimensions of a building that once housed a theatrical revolution.
Modern scholarship has made us acutely aware of Shakespeare’s rich language and thematic complexity but the Pop-up Globe reminds us the Bard also knew a thing or two about entertainment.
British director Tom Mallaburn brings an enormous sense of fun to a production that has pop culture colliding with traditional folk music, a mash-up of accents and robust buffoonery that feeds off the boisterous energy of the groundlings standing in front of the stage.
Judicious cuts to text allow time for improvised banter with the audience, a finely choreographed wrestling match, a lip-synced tribute to Titanic and raucous cameos by a frolicking mob of sheep.
All of which seems perfectly in tune with the themes of a play in which Shakespeare appears to be simultaneously mocking and celebrating the irresistible silliness of love.
The all-male casting shines a revealing light on the crossgender shenanigans that are at the heart of As You Like It. In the plum role of Rosalind, Jonathan Tynan-Moss is a hilarious bundle of energy as he swings between bovverboy macho and the heart-fluttering rapture of a lovestruck girl.
Michael Mahony as the musically talented jester Touchstone establishes an intimate bond with the audience while Rawiri Paratene and Stephen Papps bring a measure of dignity to a rag-tag band of exiles seeking refuge in Arden Forest.
With four weddings and a reconciliation, the finale is suitably anarchic with bagpipes, cacophonous percussion and a dance routine somewhere between a Highland fling, an Irish jig and a Beyonce video.