Abstract
Ian McKellen's portrayal of the Dane in Sean Mathias's 2021 Hamlet raised the issue of ‘age-blind’ casting (reviewed in Cahiers Élisabéthains, 107[1], 2022, pp. 104–7). McKellen, in his early eighties, played among a company cast, more or less, in concord with the age of their fictional characters. In this way, McKellen was the exception and, although the production did not especially labour this particular casting decision, it attracted much press attention and comment. Omar Elerian's As You Like It is different in the sense that, with the exception of four young actors (all cast in minor roles), the company was uniformly advanced in age. Geraldine James and Malcolm Sinclair, for instance, in the roles of Rosalind and Orlando, were both born in 1950 while Celia Bannerman (Phoebe) was born in 1944.
In a play that underlines the immaturity of Orlando's Petrarchan lover on the one hand, and the decrepitude of the toothless old retainer, Adam (1.1.79), on the other hand, the decision to play all the characters with a company of a uniform age, seemed to fly in the face of the text's narrative logic. The play's emphasis on fathers and daughters, on generational conflict, was all but erased by the lack of age discrimination between Maureen Beatie's Celia and Robin Soans's Frederick, for instance.
Moreover, the production paid very little attention to the ages of its actors so that Sinclair's Orlando was the usual portrayal of dippy inexperience and David Fielder's Silvius was the customary combination of puerile frustration and whining. Although nearly all the roles were occupied by ‘old hands’, nothing had been changed conceptually to match role to actor or actor to role. Nothing wrong with that of course; indeed, it was a pleasure to watch such seasoned performers, and the language was beautifully enunciated (Michael Bertenshaw's Oliver and James's Rosalind were the very models of clarity), but one was left wondering, what was the point of all this?
Singularly intrusive was the lowering of three aged rockers on a flown-in gantry – long hair and shades out of the 1970s – Rod Stewart, Mick Jagger, Elton John – an amalgam of all the golden oldies! But again, the reason for their inclusion was far from clear. Such seniority necessitated the adaptation of the wrestling bout into a simple arm-wrestle and the confrontation of Oliver and Orlando became a series of choregraphed ‘moves’ with the actors counting their positions out loud. James's Rosalind winced as she lowered herself onto the stage as though registering her aged joints but all these ‘double-takes’ served only to divert our attention to the company and away from the play.
The only role that fused the age of the performer with that of the role was that of Adam. In a pre-show announcement, Bertenshaw told us that this was a reunified company who had first played As You Like It in 1978 and that Adam, in that production, had been played by an actor who had since died. The conceit was all a bit laboured but it did explain why Adam was played by an overcoat, carefully laid out on the ground or gently moved from chair to chair. This absent presence, a signifier of imminent mortality, was strangely potent and would have perfectly summed up the play's fixation to do with youth and age. In this way the uniformly elderly casting seemed redundant and, as is often the way with theatrical ‘statements’, rapidly became invisible.
More insistent, and constantly more conspicuous, was the obsession with theatrum mundi. Of course, this is a play-world that Duke Senior describes as a ‘wide and universal theatre’ (2.7.137) and in which Jaques remarks that ‘all the men and women [are] merely players’ (140). Rosalind's gender-bending impersonation of Orlando's love object makes the point that selfhood is as much about assuming an identity as inhabiting one. But the precise relationship between this theme of the play and the maturity of its company was not clear and the preoccupation with theatricality had more to do with set and staging than company or performance.
Ana Inés Jabares-Pita had set all but the production's closing sequence in a rehearsal room with plywood floor and walls marked up in stage manager's coloured tape, black stacking chairs, a properties table and a wall filled with images and sheets of type-written notes and production research. Upstage left was a fire escape and extinguisher, features of the most functional of settings. Actors, in ordinary casual clothes, drifted onto set, gulping from bottles of water, or tinkering at the upright piano. Mogali Masuku and Tyreke Leslie were variously on the book and occasionally prompting. Rose Wardlaw entered, to cries of ‘You’re on Rosey’, to take on the role of Le Beau. Beattie's stage whisper to her was to ‘play a French accent’ and the most awful ’Allo ’Allo! stereotype resulted before the actress panicked, ‘I’m dropping the French’. These painfully unfunny asides were, I suppose, continuous with the metadramatic set but served merely to distract from Shakespeare's script. The worst offender here was James Hayes's Touchstone. Hayes is a great actor but was here given much banal padding, introducing himself to us as ‘James Hayes, classical actor’, gesturing to his own paper hat with an ironic ‘No expense spared’, and later, thoroughly off-book, giving us a potted biography of Christopher Marlowe. Most annoying was a long, labourious sequence with him folding paper sheep and then herding them. In these ways the play's fictionality was repeatedly interrupted but for no good reason that was readily apparent. But the wooing scenes held up well, in spite of all this distraction. James and Sinclair sparred brilliantly around each other and James's relationship to Beattie's Celia was, intriguingly, rather more brittle than usual.
Oddly, the programme credits two Jaques: ‘Oliver Cotton or Christopher Saul’. On the night I saw it Cotton took the role, frequently missing lines and marring the script. Was this a fictional dementia or is the listing of two actors alternating the role evidence of its length or difficulty (although Rosalind speaks 25% of the play, Jaques just 8%)? If the former, I am right to note it as a feature of the production; if the latter, I apologise. Perhaps the production should have better enabled me to distinguish between the alternatives.
The final sequence was baffling. Rosalind entered to be married in full Elizabethan dress, looking like the Virgin Queen herself. The upstage wall was flown out to reveal the misty and overgrown Forest of Arden and the lines just spoken, ‘To you I give myself for I am yours’ (5.4.115f) echoed quietly as though the forest were murmuring them. Jaques de Bois appeared between the trees in full medieval armour complete with plumed helmet, ‘Let me have audience for a word or two’ (149) and the loose ends were tied up (Hymen was cut).
The house lights came up and Rosalind spoke her epilogue directly to us. Robin Soans (who played both dukes) is credited in the programme with the ‘New Epilogue’. It was a triumph: witty and apposite. In its references to ‘a woman of advancing years’, ‘love of a maturer kind’ and ‘silvered locks and shrunken shank’, it unashamedly and, indeed, wittily, alluded to the casting but even here, at its most explicit, the reason for such casting remained elusive.