Ralph Fiennes began his stage career with Shakespeare 40 years ago playing a fairy (Cobweb) in A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Open Air theatre – by coincidence my first enrapturing encounter with the Bard. Since then, he has proved one of our most committed, as well as one of our finest, Shakespeareans. Now, with As You Like It in Bath, part of his bold summer season there, he directs old Bill on stage for the first time – at 62.
He could have gone into actor-manager mode and starred in the play too – in the style of Henry Irving, whom he’s playing, in rep, in Grace Pervades. Instead, he has recruited some famous faces to spruce up this evergreen classic of amorous confusion in a forest (not so far, really, from Dream), among them Harriet Walter and Dylan Moran.
Charlie Rowe as Orlando and Gloria Obianyo as Rosalind – Marc Brenner
The result? Well, Walter is splendidly wistful and sardonic as the melancholy Jaques, crunching through an apple as she grinds through that haunting vision of deterioration, “the seven ages of man” speech. But the production itself, while fitfully captivating, is not nearly as fleet, funny or mesmerising as you’d like it. If the show just lightened up, its pervasive tension would lift fast.
Bob Crowley’s set offers a vista of receding proscenium frames, hinting at the psychological labyrinth into which the principals are drawn after Rosalind (Gloria Obianyo), banished from court, cross-dresses as a bloke, “Ganymede”, and then winds up impersonating herself in a bizarre bid to tutor the smitten Orlando (Charlie Rowe) in the ways of love. The design is imposing but too austere. And it elicits a stately delivery which has the virtue of clarity and the vice of ponderousness.
Bob Crowley’s set offers a vista of receding proscenium frames – Marc Brenner
Fiennes – whose rare magnetism can make the language soar even at its most solemnly intoned – should encourage the cast to take their cue instead from Obianyo’s Rosalind and Amber James as her cousin Celia. The two are a frolicsome, spontaneous delight in their roles. And Obianyo attains a bona fide allure as Ganymede that has Rowe moving in for a kiss on the lips from which he recoils, comically dazed and confused.
Moran, best-known for his stand-up, applies his off-hand, enjoyably tipsy Irish intonations to Touchstone, the sardonic jester, but only comes into his own during a tongue-in-cheek romp with the wench Audrey (Amber Grappy). Walter is underused, as is Emilio Iannucci, son of Armando; blink and you miss him at the end. No disaster or disgrace, then, but more akin to homework than a holiday.
Until 6 Sept. Tickets: theatreroyal.org.uk
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