As You Like It (24 page)

Michael Boyd
was born in Belfast in 1955, educated in London and Edinburgh, and completed his MA in English Literature at Edinburgh University. He trained as a director at the Malaya Bronnaya Theatre in Moscow. He then went on to work at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, joining the Sheffield Crucible as associate director in 1982. In 1985 Boyd became founding artistic director of the Tron Theatre in Glasgow, becoming equally acclaimed for staging new writing and innovative productions of the classics. He was drama director of the New Beginnings Festival of Soviet Arts in Glasgow in 1999. He joined the RSC as an associate director in 1996 and has since directed numerous productions of Shakespeare’s plays. He won the Laurence Olivier Award for Best Director for his version of the
Henry VI
plays in the RSC’s “This England: The Histories” in 2001. He took over as artistic director of the RSC in 2003 and oversaw the extraordinarily successful Complete Works Festival in 2006–07. His own contribution to this was a cycle of all eight history plays, from
Richard II
through to
Richard III
, with the same company of actors. This transfered to London’s Roundhouse Theatre in 2008 and won multiple awards. He talks here about his 2009 production of
As You Like It
in the Courtyard Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, with Katy Stephens as Rosalind.

It’s very much a play of two worlds—the court and the country. How did you and your designer set about conveying that?

DC:
We were more interested in the connections between the two worlds than their differences. The set remained the same throughout; we had a very large tree which served both for an urban garden and the middle of a forest. The tree was an evergreen, so it could also work through the seasons, which was an important feature of the production. We moved from winter to summer to autumn, so that the end of the play felt like harvesttime. We started the play at Christmas, with the tree as a Christmas tree. We chose Christmas because it is a time where loss is keenly felt. Rosalind has lost her
father, and this was a time where she would usually be with him, so her memories of him brought on the melancholy she felt at the start of the play. Family conflicts often happen at Christmas too, so the Oliver/Orlando row was put into context. We were also interested in the summer-holiday quality to the third act of the play, as Ganymede tutors Orlando. The only way that we emphasized the different worlds visually was through costume. The court was a nighttime world of formal evening dress, Arden was a cross between a summer holiday and
Lord of the Flies
. The transformation from court into country was done by the actors who doubled as the dukes and the respective courts. As we first moved into the Forest of Arden, to take us into Duke Senior’s “Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile” speech, the actors took their tops off as it snowed, as if Duke Senior’s celebrating the honest, harsh reality of nature as opposed to the artificial, deceitful world of the Court.

MB:
The court is often portrayed as deeply unattractive, but Tom Piper, the designer, and I felt that the dukedom should look as if it was worth fighting for. We also wanted it to boast of the purity and the reformed color palette of a “new broom” revolutionary court. Two uninterrupted rectangles of very pale parquet against which the restrictive choreography and black Elizabethan dress of Frederick’s world could be seen to be striking as well as oppressive.

6.
Dominic Cooke production, 2005: Duke Senior’s exiles return to the harsh but honest reality of nature.

Arden then became a subversive dismantling of the too-perfect court, a humanizing reinvention of its constituent parts through poor theater improvisation.

The received idea of Arden is sentimental and decorative, but Shakespeare talks of winter, rough weather, exile, and a hard-earned subsistence. Frederick’s troops are attacking the woods, and animals are hunted and slain not for sport but for “venison.”

As the exiled world reinvents for us how best to live, the high collars and corsets disappear and gradually the visual world moves from the rigid uniformity of Renaissance Protestant revolution to a colorful pluralism of contemporary dress.

A careful reading of the text suggests that Arden is not a single place: Corin seems to be a farmer on the fringes of the forest, faced with real economic problems, whereas the duke and his men hunting the stag seem to be in deep, perhaps more mythic, woodlands (Robin Hood and all that). Was this an angle you explored?

DC:
With Arden, Shakespeare is contrasting the myth of the pastoral idyll with the reality of the hardship of country life. We played the cold weather in the early Arden scenes, showing how difficult it is to actually survive in the wild, especially for the exiles, used to the creature comforts of the court. We imagined a shift from winter to summer before Act 3 Scene 1, which is where we placed the interval.

I was very interested in the conflict between Duke Senior’s idealization of the life of the exiled court and Jaques’ cynicism. For me, every scene of
As You Like It
contrasts a romantic with a realistic view of life, and that exists as much in the court as in the country scenes. Duke Senior’s opening speech expresses the notion that by throwing off the shackles of civilization it is possible to reveal an inner authenticity, free of “painted pomp,” whereas Jaques’ view is that life is a series of different performances—as expressed in his “seven ages of man” speech—and there is no “inner core”: the idea
that you can throw off civilization and become this pure being, to him, is just a sentimental myth, a political ideology to make the exiles feel that their lot, which is pretty miserable, is actually a happy one. Also, Duke Senior has a difficult political situation on his hands. We learn from Charles the wrestler that the forest lords have “thrown themselves into voluntary exile,” but when they get to Arden they find that they’ve exposed themselves to “winter and rough weather,” so Duke Senior’s optimism could also be read as an attempt to convince them that it’s all going to be worth it and they should stick with him. I suppose that makes Amiens his chief propagandist.

MB:
The woods of Corin, Silvius, and Phoebe are comically overlaid with idealized, mythic notions of courtly love every bit as much as the duke’s exiled court’s “inner” forest is in search of the mythic simplicities of the “golden age.” Both sets of forest dwellers live in actual hardship, and from the word go there is a busy traffic between them: Orlando, Touchstone, Jaques, Rosalind, and Oliver all meet long before the wedding. The main distinction (even if in part the result of disguise) is one of class.

Banishment, a usurping brother (and uncle), envy, and the abuse of authority all surface in the opening act of this comedy, and Rosalind’s situation at the beginning of the play is very close to Hamlet’s. Tragic court, comic Arden, then? Or is it more complex than that?

DC:
For me, it is more complex. I think Shakespeare is interested in both simultaneously subverting and supporting all those conventional notions of court as false and country as authentic. There’s always a dialectic, a duality being played out in
As You Like It
. In the court there is warmth in the intimate relationship between Celia and Rosalind surviving against the odds. There’s loyalty in Touchstone and even Le Beau. While the world of the court is performative, Arden is in some respects even more so. Here, for example, Rosalind is in the permanent state of performing Ganymede. Equally, the country is as full of pain and loss as the court. The first time we see anyone talk about love in Arden it’s Silvius, and he’s in agony. We played Silvius’ pain very strongly in our production, the terrible
despair and torture of what Phoebe’s doing to him. Arden’s also a place of great physical hardship: Corin talks about how hard his life is. What’s continually subverted is the sentimental cliché that the country is “nice”—Shakespeare, after all, was a country boy himself and knew that country life and country people can be far from nice. It can be a cruel and dangerous place.

MB:
Rosalind is our Hamlet as we would like it. Written around the same time as her less fortunate brother Hamlet, and her other sibling Henry V, Rosalind comes at civil strife and injustice and a world out of joint from a different angle. Perhaps she is blessed that as a woman she was not “born to set it right,” and can therefore behave more like an artist, more like Shakespeare: the “powerless” subversive. She is also allowed a more fully explored exile from court than Hamlet, and
As You Like It
accordingly invites us to explore the alternatives to the misery of rule by Claudius and Frederick.

Where do you think Jaques’ melancholy stems from?

DC:
I speculated that he is someone who had suffered a loss in love that he’s never recovered from. Clearly, the play is concerned with the different ways human beings go about trying to find love. For me, Jaques is the cynic who was once the lover. He was once the Orlando figure, and that’s why he despises Orlando so much: because Orlando represents something that he has crushed within himself—the loving, open-hearted, vulnerable young man who will, in Jaques’ eyes, inevitably get hurt. He cannot tolerate romantic views in anyone, especially in Duke Senior and Orlando.

To me it’s significant that the two characters that Shakespeare invented that weren’t in the source text were Jaques and Touchstone, who are the cynics, the anti-romantics. This was very significant in my understanding of the play. The elements that Shakespeare’s added to the story are the minor notes, the voices of dissent, the anti-pastoral elements. So it is useful to look at what he was trying to do with those characters tonally. In the early court scenes between Celia and Rosalind, Rosalind frequently expresses a romantic view of love and Celia undercuts it. The same dynamic continues in Arden—Jaques is introduced as a foil for Duke Senior, to undercut and puncture
the duke’s romantic view of man as a pure being with an essence and a moral core; Jaques’ melancholy is a minor note that cuts against that because it speaks of loss, of human frailty and the inevitability of death.

MB:
Rosalind gives the ungenerous answer to this question in her encounter with Jaques. She steps effortlessly into the shoes of the little boy in
The Emperor’s New Clothes
, and strips Jaques naked with startling clarity. He is revealed as a lonely, would-be monk who thinks he can find truth in ascetic gestures, but who still yearns for company, the court, and pretty youths.

Elsewhere, we, like the duke’s exiled court, find ourselves utterly drawn to what this melancholic has to say about brief mortality, and the wicked and venal nature of the world. That said, the self-importance of the usual treatment of Jaques in the English tradition is surprising, and possibly due to the reputation of the role as a “star part” for important actors.

And what on earth is going on with the other Jaques, the middle brother who suddenly appears at the end? Why did Shakespeare call him Jaques as well? Just lazy writing on Shakespeare’s part? It’s not exactly a rewarding part for an actor, is it?

DC:
Shakespeare is often interested in the number three in his plays; the classic example being
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, where everything’s structured around three worlds. The number three in drama is very potent. It implies a beginning, a middle, and an end. In the story of
As You Like It
, Oliver is the beginning, Orlando the middle, and Jaques de Bois is the end. Perhaps the reason he’s called Jaques is that the other Jaques disappears out of the play at the point that he comes in. And the original Jaques disappears because hope wins over and so the minor notes are no longer necessary. The new Jaques brings in a crucial message of hope: transformation is possible, although hard-won.

MB:
Jaques de Bois completes the family and the picture of Britain: Orlando in exiled opposition; Oliver, the traitor to his family’s heritage; and Jaques, the secret recusant, allowed to study at university but keeping his faith, and waiting for the return of the “true king.”

Practically speaking, what devices did you use for the cross-dressing of Rosalind?

DC:
The main focus was in the physicality and attitude of the character rather than the costume, which we kept simple. Because we were focusing on the continuums between court and country, one of the first decisions Lia [Williams—Rosalind], Rae [Smith—designer], and I came to about the way Rosalind should look, was that she shouldn’t have a wig. Originally we were going to have long tresses in the court, then Lia’s own short hair would be revealed in the country. But we felt it was useful to leave as much of the job of the transformation to the actor and her physical life, rather than using the more obvious visual sign that long hair equals “girl” and short hair equals “boy.” We gave Rosalind a quite formal, classical evening dress in the court. In Arden, she wore a pair of brown jeans, a white shirt with a pair of braces, and boots, so there was a slightly ragamuffin, scruffy feeling about her clothes. Lia also had padding between her legs which helped her stand, move, and feel like a male.