posted 14 June 2005
As You Like It
My latest excursion in a regular series of theatre outings with A was to Shakespeare's As You Like It at the Wyndham. It was excellently done: the language, so often a problem with Shakespeare, was so flowingly spoken and meaningfully expressed that there was no problem at all. It helped my enjoyment that the costumes were all set in the 1920s (my favourite period) and that various portions were set to music, ranging from cheerful folk songs to 1950s big-band crooning. Totally unsubtle sexual innuendo and the occasional burst of slapstick completed the picture of theatre as I love it most: unpretentious, slightly silly, a little bit dirty, and entirely fun.
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marc
By the way, if you're at the DVD store anytime soon and are looking for something to see, get Richard Eyre's movie from last year, Stage Beauty (Billy Crudup, Claire Danes, Rupert Everett in it, and a FANTASTIC score). Also, although it'll be harder to find, a French Canadian movie from 1996 called Lilies/Les Feluettes, in which a history is told by a man falsely imprisoned for the murder of his lover, half-acted out by his fellow inmates and half told in flashback; the beauty is that, in the flashback scenes, the prison inmates occur as the characters in his memory, so the movie's truly seamless. Won't go into the plot details, but it's definitely a must-see.