Bard gets a touch of hillbilly hilarity
Gentle reader, I’ve sat through some pretty tiresome As You like Its in my time. But I’m pleased to say Max Webster’s charming, outdoor revival isn’t one of them.
the joy of his modern dress production is that it plugs into comic types from today’s Britain and matches them with their elizabethan counterparts.
One problem can be that leading lady Rosalind is an irksomely controlling girl teaching her young suitor Orlando how to woo her.
Alright, as a female forced to disguise herself as a boy she is a relatively passive character. But while forgiveable, it doesn’t make her loveable.
Webster’s solution is not so much to fix her character as to pack her in with a much livelier set of hillbilly hipsters and turn the show into a virtual musical.
Starting on an austere steel platform strewn with the garbage of the city, the play opens with a rock version of the Rain It Raineth every Day from twelfth night.
later, it’s off to a forest shack that, were it not for recycled solar panels on the roof, could have come from the lumberjack musical Seven Brides For Seven Brothers.
Charlie Fink’s score gives us a torch song about winter, a boy band take on ‘Hey nonny no’, an R&B number to go with a deer hunt and a hearty hoedown.
But what really steals the show is Danny Kirrane’s turn as tubby fool touchstone, in shorts and t-shirt, grappling with his pop-up tent and singing serenades into beer bottles for Amy Booth- Steel as his deliciously simple shepherdess.
Olivia Vinall is easy to watch as the girlish, just about endurably bossy Rosalind; while edward Hogg is perfectly sweet as the aggrieved and lovelorn Orlando who wins her heart by decking an 18st wrestling champ.
But it’s Kirrane who taps into the play’s vein of mirth and allows the rustic revelry to flow free.