[In the following review of the 1999 Globe Theatre staging of As You Like It directed by Lucy Bailey, Potter praises Anastasia Hille's unconventional Rosalind, but contends that the production as a whole took few interpretive risks.]

Given the focus on prostitution in Dekker and Middleton's The Honest Whore and Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, the obvious Shakespearean companion piece for Merchant would have been Measure for Measure. As You Like It was probably selected for box-office reasons. Though it offered fewer ideological risks than Merchant, it was even riskier for the audience, because director Lucy Bailey opted for a promenade-type performance with actors in the yard as well as on the stage. Spectators needed streetwise survival skills to leap backward on a surface littered with discarded soda cans, as the wicked Duke's followers strong-armed them out of the way to make room for the wrestling match at ground level. But this was a friendly and satisfying production. The opening, in which a ballad singer supplied much of the background material found in Lodge's Rosalynde while the characters mimed Old Sir Rowland and his three sons, established the atmosphere of a lighthearted adventure story (the play opened shortly before the release in London cinemas of a restored print of Errol Flynn's Adventures of Robin Hood). The characters lived up to this prologue: Jonathan Cole's Oliver was vulnerable and bewildered in his first-act soliloquy, obviously ripe for conversion; so was the wicked duke, who was neither fascist nor sadist; the dignified Duke Senior had the respect of his followers. Both dukes were played by David Rintoul, whose attendants also doubled, and the rapidity with which one group followed another onto the stage focused attention on their quick-change virtuosity rather than, say, the totalitarian nature of the court. Jaques (John McEnery) looked sour but could laugh drily at jokes about himself and needed no explanation of Orlando's suggestion that he should look in the brook to see the drowned fool. David Fielder's Touchstone had a more genial relationship with the groundlings than Magni's Launcelot; Audrey (Sonia Ritter) was sweet-natured if randy. Both seemed concerned for the audience's comfort and even at the curtain call were checking on the well-being of a small boy who nearly got hurt by a piece of debris from the stage.

The one scary element in Arden was, oddly enough, Rosalind herself, in an unusual and fascinating performance by Anastasia Hille, who apparently wanted to turn the play into something more complex, more female-oriented, than its source, or the ballad would allow. When she started to pull down her trousers, on “What shall I do with my doublet and hose?” she seemed anxious to leave no doubt that this was no boy-actor. From then on, the relationship between Orlando and Ganymede was a war between an excitable Rosalind fully aware of the sexual ambiguity of the situation and an Orlando (Paul Hilton) too conventional and unsophisticated not to react with a “yuck” after he and his new pal let themselves get carried away at the end of the mock marriage. Tonia Chauvet, an almost alarmingly forceful Celia, also showed that she had views of her own on the wooing game. Taking her cue from the character's annoyed line “You have simply misused our sex in your love prate,” she let out a whoop of malicious delight when Phebe began her pursuit of Rosalind, obviously seeing it as a well-deserved punishment for the assumed misogyny that had attracted Phebe in the first place. It was surprising when Rosalind, Celia, and even old Adam in the role of Hymen made their final entrance dressed in damp, clinging shifts, and still more surprising when the other actors behaved just as if they had turned up in the usual elegant wedding clothes. The point may have been that the men saw the women only as they wished to see them. But this reading (assuming that I'm right about it) was only a tantalizing possibility in a production that otherwise took the title of the play as a key to its interpretation.