Writer: William Shakespeare
Directors: Sean Holmes and Charlie Josephine
“I pray thee, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry,” says Duke Frederick’s daughter Celia, changing the play’s opening line. This uplifting late-summer production of As You Like It switches the order of the first two scenes so that it starts with the women. It’s an early sign that this will be a merry, feminist take on Shakespeare’s subversive comedy. Two pairs of feuding brothers form the plot’s social and political architecture, but this production centres the more interesting stories of female friendship and autonomy. Cousins Celia and Rosalind decide to leave the oppressive and inflexible court of the increasingly tyrannical Duke Frederick and look for Rosalind’s banished father in the free-spirited Forest of Arden.
The production harnesses the thatched and oak-built magic of the Globe, filling it with music, dancing, laughter, song and a live-hand-painted forest that is different every night. Musical director, composer and performer Katie Richardson is joined by several percussionists and virtuoso clarinet and saxophone player Isreal (Ọlá) Akindipe in creating the lively music that supercharges this feel-good show. It opens with medieval-sounding bells, pipes and drums, and becomes progressively more modern until Richardson, playing Hymen, goddess of marriage, comes on with a big white guitar and flamboyant layered costume.
Designer Paul Wills, as ever, has lots of fun here. The artificial world of Duke Frederick’s court is full of starchy 18th-century formality. The huge gold-framed blank canvases that will become the forest reinforce the emptiness of the usurper’s construct, where terrified courtiers scurry like mice. The initial costumes are all huge, powdered wigs, deep cuffs, lace ruffles, heavily embroidered frock coats and colourful heeled shoes. Celia (brilliantly aristocratic Gracie Oddie-James) and Rosalind (outstanding Lola Shalam) wear rigid wide-skirted dresses that restrict their movements.
Disguising themselves to travel more safely, Celia dresses up as a hilariously parodic shepherdess (think Bo Peep in Toy Story) and must spend much of the second half watching Rosalind/“Ganymede”. Now dressed more freely as a Dick Whittington-style swashbuckler, “Ganymede” flirts with rough-diamond lover Orlando, played by co-director Charlie Josephine. The homoerotic energy generated in this celebrated same-sex courtship is enhanced by Shalam’s lucid control of the text and Josephine’s scrappy-underdog directness.
Colm Gormley plays both Captain-Hook style baddie Duke Frederick and his banished brother, as well as the old shepherd Corin with his moving defence of a simple, working life: “I earn that I eat, get that / I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness,” he tells the court jester Touchstone (Jonnie Broadbent) who spends most of the play half-dressed. Touchstone’s courtship of Audrey (Phoebe Naughton) is a crotch-grabbing, lust-fuelled race for the bedroom.
There are further spirited turns by Molly Madigan as proud shepherdess Phoebe and Busa Wickramasuriya as her devoted fan Silvius. The comedy in most productions lies in the city-educated characters outwitting the rustic simpletons. Here the rural workers have more resistance, and it feels as if the resulting partnerships might have an outside chance at happiness. Katherine Pearce is an interesting piece of casting as Jaques, here disguised (like Rosalind) to roam the Forest in search of philosophy.
As You Like It is co-directed by Sean Holmes, who brought us last year’s Wild-West-style Romeo and Juliet with Lola Shalam as a similarly forthright and feisty heroine. The directors have worked together several times, including on last winter’s effervescent Pinocchio, with Josephine adapting the original text into a gleefully irreverent comedy, and before that on Josephine’s fabulously empowering queer Cowbois, which premiered at Stratford-upon-Avon’s Swan Theatre in 2023. This now feels like a powerhouse team, simultaneously celebrating Shakespeare’s poetry and the contemporary stories they can tell with it.
Runs until 25 October 2026
