As You Like It (26 page)

As luck would have it, I played Celia in a production for the RSC in 2003. So I know the play and it is one of my favorites—I love this play! It’s about love, living, and the things that count in life.

As rehearsals began, I didn’t know what I would make of Rosalind: having played Celia, I knew quite a lot about Rosalind, but only through Celia’s eyes. I had to spend very little time relearning those scenes, because Rosalind’s words were almost as familiar as Celia’s, having heard them and having had to respond to them in the previous production.

Of course, what you absolutely underestimate is the different perspective—Rosalind’s perspective is entirely different from Celia’s. Her journey is so different: Rosalind is somebody who has to leave where she lives because otherwise she’ll be killed. She has lost her father; she then has to leave behind somebody she has just fallen in love with, and to dress up as a boy to protect herself. She is a victim of circumstance, but she has the wit and the heart to turn the play around. All the tricks and games that she sets up come to an end when she decides that the most important thing is to be able to tell Orlando that she loves him.

At the start, Rosalind’s most important relationship is with Celia. It’s a wonderful relationship; it’s that special friendship with somebody who is your own sex and your own age. They’ve grown up together, they know each other inside out, and they adore each other. But they are at a particular point in their lives when something quite catastrophic has just happened: Celia’s father has just banished Rosalind’s father. So Rosalind, who was brought up as the princess, is now not the princess anymore and is not the heir to the throne: Celia is. It is a remarkable testament to the strength of their friendship that not even Rosalind’s banishment can drive them apart—they stick together.

Duke Frederick has taken over very recently and Rosalind has been through a lot. She has lost her father—maybe only in the last week?—so she doesn’t know who she is, or what her position is. She is yearning to be loved. When this young guy Orlando comes in and is about to be the next one to be demolished in a wrestling match, she can’t bear it. She thinks, “That’s ridiculous! It’s a mistake: this beautiful young man shouldn’t be attempting a fight.” And at the point when he explains his reasons for fighting, not least because of his respect for the memory of his own father and his loyalty to his family name, she falls in love with him in an instant.

I don’t have any scenes with my father until the very end, which is interesting. In Act 1, the absence of Rosalind’s father is the reason for Rosalind’s destitution. Her father meant the world to her, and she and Celia head for the Forest of Arden in order to try to find him. But when Orlando arrives in the forest, all Rosalind’s attentions turn to him and she forgets her father. That is an illustration of how huge her passion for Orlando must be: it has usurped her love for her father. Can this be the same girl that we saw at the beginning of the play?

I think we get clues from Rosalind early on that she is ready for love—she’s got men on the brain! When Celia is trying to cheer her up, Rosalind agrees to try and have some fun, and her first suggestion is that they have a chat about falling in love. Then, when she and Celia are joking about Nature and Fortune, Rosalind says that Fortune deals a really bad hand to women and that men have it much easier! So it seems that she is thinking about men and maybe even finding a husband.

When Orlando appears, it’s a sexual attraction at first, and then it becomes something even fuller. She sees he has a beautiful heart and stands for beautiful things. His speech explaining why he wants to wrestle (“I shall do my friends no wrong, for I have none to lament me”) alerts her to his hidden depths. There is a meeting of their souls at that moment. Then Orlando wins the wrestling! And then it turns out that he is the son of Sir Rowland—whom her dad worshipped
more than any other human being that ever lived. So for Rosalind, this boy is about as special as they come.

When Rosalind is banished, the rug is pulled from under her feet and she’s lost again. Even though she hadn’t established a relationship with Orlando, she’s left with a wound that she doesn’t know how to heal. She’s in love. Her priorities completely change. She entirely forgets about her father! There’s an interesting off-scene moment between Rosalind and Duke Senior at the end of Act 4. Rosalind casually mentions that she met her father the day before while dressed as a boy:

She jokes about being of the same high birth as the duke, then moves the conversation straight back to Orlando!

She’s not particularly attractive at that point. Her behavior is so crass. It’s not until the end of the play, the day of the wedding, that she calms down from this crazy, loved-up state, embraces her dad again, and gives him the love that has always been there.

Shakespeare wrote the part for a boy actor, which would have made it easy for the original Rosalind to assume the role of Ganymede—but what’s it like for a female actor to play a boy?

I once had to play Jesus in Dennis Potter’s
Son of Man
, and I spent the first two weeks of rehearsals working out how to be a man; but then about a fortnight in, it occurred to me that Jesus wasn’t preoccupied with that: he was a man, and therefore I just had to be a man and get on with it. Obviously Rosalind isn’t a man—she’s just acting like a man—but the guise works so well for her because her own personality has a lot of masculine qualities anyway. So for me, it’s about exploring this aspect further, not having to obey any of the female etiquette, just being a guy.

In production, I think Rosalind has an obligation to become as
much of a boy as possible in everybody’s minds, including her own. This is partly for the sake of Orlando, who totally mistakes her for a boy (as do Corin and various others who aren’t in on the game); if she is really rather womanly and just happens to be wearing blokes’ clothes, then Orlando looks very stupid. Moreover, Rosalind’s immersion in the Ganymede role governs the heart of the play. Here is a woman who chooses a disguise for her own protection, enters imaginatively into that role, and finds it so liberating, so exciting being that person, that she actually forgets she is Rosalind.

I heard lots of interesting things about the way men operate from the other guys in the company! Of course, everybody is an individual, but if you’re content with broad generalizations, the differences between men and women are striking. For example, I was forbidden to walk backward in rehearsals, because it’s too apologetic and humble and looks like you are making excuses; as a boy, it’s imperative to show a natural assertiveness and not even ask the other person what they think, but just go for it straight, and say, “Yeah, this is what I think.” There is a physicality that goes with that, and when you stop being nervous about it and get into the groove of it, it’s really fun and quite seductive.

I had voice sessions with Jan Haydn-Rowles [voice coach] and I thought it was going to be her saying, “Drop your shoulders, lower your voice,” but she proved to be more like a psychologist! And of course, she’s right to approach it that way, because the voice is the expression of the soul. It’s how she gets people to do accents that are entirely foreign to their own, because they are more to do with psychology and culture and the way that you think.

The wonderful thing about working with Jan is that it’s not a case of thinking about what I should or shouldn’t be doing next in terms of my voice. Instead, it’s to think about the way boys think (which is exactly what Rosalind adopts anyway). That’s the best disguise: if you stop thinking like a woman, you actually stop behaving like one. And if you stop behaving like a woman, then, in some respects, you stop being a woman. If you’ve got a few helpful things like short hair and trousers, then you’re quite far down the track to convincing other people that you are a boy.

So Jan pointed out a couple of the boys in the cast as very good examples of straightforward guys who say what they think and don’t apologize for it. Interestingly, male thinking is often quite factual. Jan and I had a fascinating chat all about football, and why it ticks all the boxes for male behavior: there’s a team, with positions that can be compared; there is a league table where everything gets lined up and points allocated; and it’s a competition where you wait to find out who is going to win. It’s such a cliché that when men get together they talk about sport, but there are reasons for it! So I thought about that—after all, sport (first wrestling and then hunting) is very important in this play.

I had my hair cut short, and it was very helpful to look in the mirror and realize, “Oh yeah, I don’t have a ponytail to worry about any more!” It’s much less fuss having short hair. What particularly helps is seeing other people’s reactions and how they respond according to the way you are. My husband said to me at home recently, “I can’t wait for you to wear a skirt again,” but of course I felt I couldn’t while I was rehearsing for Rosalind—the element of the role I really had to conquer was being a boy. So I deliberately chose jeans and T-shirts for rehearsals; as a result, I frequently turned up looking like Jack [Laskey], my Orlando. The wardrobe choices for men aren’t vast, as I have discovered! If you happen to put on jeans and a gray T-shirt, you’re bound to match somebody else.

All of that helps, because it’s about entering into the character and committing to being believable as a man. So you benefit from looking more boyish, because then it rebounds back to you via other people’s reactions, and this corroborates your sense of the character.

When I was in the forest, my costume was leather: leather jacket, leather breeches, long leather boots—leather top to toe! It’s very different from the layers of silk and petticoats and bodices and corsets and all of that that goes on at the beginning with Rosalind’s dress. Because my hair was cut short, I wore a long wig at the beginning which I then whipped off backstage after Act 1, as if Rosalind had cut her hair. It would be so nice to cut your hair every night—that would be so satisfying!—but obviously that can’t happen, so at the beginning, I had short hair underneath my wig.

8.
Naomi Frederick as Rosalind, cross-dressed and in leather, with Laura Rogers as an exceptionally lively Celia, and the wooden pillars of Shakespeare’s Globe standing for the Forest of Arden.

Were there any key scenes that you really felt you unlocked in the rehearsal process?

The whole relationship with Celia needed a lot of unlocking, because the play starts with Celia asking Rosalind to be merrier, to which Rosalind replies: “Unless you could teach me to forget a banished father, you must not learn me how to remember any extraordinary pleasure.” Initially, we were playing with Rosalind being in a bad temper, but then we realized that that could be a problem. The audience has to learn the relationship between these two very quickly, and if you open with them fighting, then the fact that these two girls adore each other isn’t very clear. Obviously, you do have fights with the people you love very much, but if that’s the first thing you show the audience, it’s a bit dangerous. These two have grown up together and are woven together, so we knew that we had to play it more like it was a chat, so that even while she is missing her dad terribly, Rosalind is so grateful for Celia’s comfort and love. Celia knows that Rosalind is not herself and asks what is wrong, which allows Rosalind to admit that she is feeling upset. You’ve got to be careful with what you present, so that was an interesting moment, discovering which might be the better way to start.

There were also developments in the scene where Rosalind encounters Silvius and Phoebe. I had been playing it that Rosalind watches Phoebe decimating Silvius, and because of her own frustration that she can’t be with Orlando, Rosalind then lays into Phoebe: “How dare you speak like that when you’re a woman!” Later, an element of that remained, but I also developed the idea that Rosalind realizes that quite simply she can get away with giving Phoebe a hard time because she is still disguised as Ganymede. So there is a huge element of enjoyment in the telling off, rather than it just being an angry scolding. These interpretative shifts are significant in terms of how we tell the story; and via these shifts we gradually unlock the characters, a process which may never be fully done.

And during the run itself?

Nothing prepares you for 1,500 people all sitting there (or should I say standing there?). The space felt immediately smaller, really quite
cozy, whereas the first time I walked into the empty Globe I remember thinking, “This is vast! I couldn’t even begin to fill it!” But actually it’s not vast. The space only feels big when it’s empty. The audience is packed quite tightly in; when it’s full the walls just seem to close in, it is quite amazing.