"As You Like It". Royal Shakespeare Theatre

As You Like It is the most gender-curious of all Shakespeare’s plays. Famously featuring (in its original incarnation) a man acting as a woman disguised as a man pretending to be a woman, it’s been a melting pot for sexual osmosis for centuries. There have been all-male productions where men act as women. There have been gender-blind productions where the limitations of sexual identity are cast aside. And there have been all-female productions where feminist themes rise to the surface like rocks from a receding tide. It’s a revolving jewel, always glinting with something new. You can do whatever you want with it, and its facets will reveal new depths. Maybe that’s what the title means.

But I’m not sure it’s ever been done like this. Daniel Evans’s production at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre is a deeply personal exploration of queer identity. It’s not just a play: it’s an act of forgiveness, of confrontation, and ultimately of reconciliation.

In Evans’s all-male (but most definitely not all-masculine) As You Like It, transgender is a powerful undercurrent. The parts of Rosalind and Celia are played by Jonathan Groff, star of the US production of Hamilton, and Fisayo Akinade, known to younger viewers as Mr Ajayi, the openly gay teacher in Heartstopper. They are acting the roles as women – recognised as women by the other characters, and dressed in womanly attire – but at the same time they are identifiably male: they don’t adopt cod soprano voices like Mark Rylance did as Olivia in his historic Twelfth Night at the Globe, they don’t ape crass notions of female physicality, and Groff’s hunky physique bespeaks more Troilus than Cressida. This Rosalind and Celia seem to occupy a space somewhere between theatrical cross-dressing and trans femininity, without being pinned down to either. And what could be more appropriate to the shifting gender identities of this play?

But this is not merely Trans You Like It. It’s a celebration of all LGBTQ+ culture. The other female characters bring different nuances to the party: Audrey, the goat-herd who, although ‘not a slut, thanks God she is foul’, is played by Gareth Snook as an out-and-out panto Dame (and the fact that Snook also plays the elderly retainer Adam suggests that he has his own secret identity that he likes to slip into when off duty). And Tim Preston nearly steals the show as Phebe, a sweet transvestite from Transsexual South Wales. This is not a question of pin the queer identity on the character: it’s more a tidal wave of gay culture treated with both serious intent and gloriously tongue-in-cheek humour.

But it’s Groff, as Rosalind, who rightly dominates proceedings. His personality mingles joie de vivre, self-mockery, and of course love, in equal proportions. When he says he will ‘be your Rosalind in a more coming-on disposition’, the sexual desire is there for all to see. And his line, ‘I should have been a woman by right’, becomes the keynote for the entire play. Faced with this, his sweetheart, Eliot Barnes-Worrell as Orlando, is caught up like a leaf on a flood. Orlando may best Charles the wrestler, but against Rosalind he is powerless. Designer Anisha Fields doesn’t even give the poor guy any trees in which to hang his love poems: he is reduced to sticking them on twigs and carrying them around the forest.

But the scenes between Barnes-Worrell and Groff do produce one of this production’s many moments of delightful revelation. Just as the RSC’s 2023 version (starring Geraldine James at the age of 72) showed that the language of youthful love sounds rich and mellifluous coming from a more mature body, this one shows that the same language sounds profoundly musical coming from two voices that share a similar register. Little exchanges like this one:

-          Am not I your Rosalind?

-          I take some joy to say you are, because I would be talking of her.

-          Well in her person I say I will not have you.

-          Then in mine own person I die.

…coming from a pair of male voices, have a kind of audible mirroring that is frankly just gorgeous to hear.

In fact, what we hear, and how we hear it, is central to Evans’s vision of the play. As You Like It contains more songs than any other Shakespeare, and here the music is not confined to lyrical passages. It’s part of the character of the show itself. This is hardly surprising, since Evans has set the Forest of Arden in rural Wales. Composer Theo Jamieson has adapted traditional Welsh folk songs into the living playlist of Duke Senior and his merry lords, and the seductive, ancient sounds act as an incantation, bringing both characters and audience under the spell of Arden. When they’re not singing in Welsh close harmony, they’re making abstract, musical bird sounds, or even bursting into gay anthems like Raye’s ‘Where the Hell is My Husband?’ Shakespeare’s original songs have gone. This is strictly a no nonny-nonny zone. But love – and music – is all around.

Why Wales? The French court in the early scenes, represented by a vast, dystopian block of white masonry, is the definition of repression: angular, unyielding and strong. And the Forest of Arden is its total opposite: full of swaying grass, hillocks and sunlit swards. It’s natural. And it invites its denizens to be natural too, whether that means living in caves, or accepting yourself and others for who you truly are. Setting it in Wales puts it in touch with an ancient language hiding deep in history, threatened by the forces of conquest and conventionality. How green is that valley.

Along with the grand vision, there are countless moments of originality that keep this production’s beaded bubbles winking at the audience: having the elderly shepherd take the role of Hymen keeps the final weddings homespun rather than ethereal; having Orlando’s reformed evil brother Oliver discover Rosalind’s breasts keeps the gender issue playfully foregrounded; having Touchstone and Audrey tongue-wag their kisses is hilarious and nods again at the world of drag acts and camp sensibility. The one downer for me was the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech, which has become so famous that it’s hard for any actor to deliver it without sounding like Highlights from Shakespeare. Richard McCabe plays Jaques with admirable melancholy, and Duke Senior here made a joke of the speech’s notoriety. It’s hard to know what else to do.

Daniel Evans was himself born and brought up in the Rhondda Valley, speaking Welsh as his first language. He has spoken about how he was bullied growing up in that traditional, macho environment where his identity was picked on before he even recognised it himself. His refuge was theatre, and he used to escape to Stratford-upon-Avon, spending hours crossing the country to watch RSC productions. Effectively, this town, this very building, for him, was the Forest of Arden. And now, in a form of reconciliation, Evans has made Wales itself Arden. Not the Wales he knew as a boy, but perhaps the Wales he needed: a place where difference is celebrated rather than punished, where Rosalind can explore her identity without fear, and where love is allowed to take whatever shape it chooses. This As You Like It is not so much a return to the director’s childhood as a way of making peace with it.

It’s hard not to feel that Daniel Evans has been building up to this play for a very long time. In As You Like It, he has found not just his Rosalind, but himself.