[In the following review, Macaulay commends Peter Hall's presentation of As You Like It at the Theatre Royal, Bath, for its refreshing straightforwardness.]

It's improbable but true that Peter Hall, who has been directing plays professionally for 50 years and who has been one of our dominant Shakespearian stylists throughout that time, is tackling As You Like It for the first time. He lays it before us now as if it had been maturing in his heart all the while. Nowhere is there anything phoney. Our hearts beat with several different views of the same bittersweet crisis. Like an architect, Hall paces and blocks the play to show what's ornament and what's structure. It's his freshest, surest production for a good many years, and without being in any way innovative or even surprising, it's an As You Like It past 10 years.

Only in one enchanting way does he seem to impose anything upon the play—by means of John Gunter's lovely, simple designs. Characters who wear Elizabethan attire at court arrive in the Forest of Arden in modern dress. And the forest, found in snowy bare-branched winter, turns to verdant spring with Orlando's love rhymes, and even briefly drops some autumn leaves, as the loves of Phoebe, Silvius, Orlando, and Ganymede seem briefly irresoluble, before reverting to May-time radiance for the finale.

Where Rebecca Hall (daughter of Peter) was loud, fierce in The Fight for Barbara last month, here as Rosalind she's quietly lit from within. But, still slightly plebeian and flat, she's not a great Rosalind. Heartcatching, all the same.

She should learn much in terms of stylish delivery from David Yelland, a Peter Hall favourite who doubles as her father and uncle with nicely distinguished nuances, and above all from Michael Siberry and Philip Voss, the production's two most expert Shakespearians. Siberry plays Touchstone with rather too heavy a humour, Voss delivers Jacques with less spontaneity than I'd like, and yet these are actors whose very voices—ideally married to their diction—take complete command of us in every word. Eric Sykes, though a bit stumbly with words, doubles as a frail Adam and drunken clergyman, both endearing. The whole cast is good, and line after line wings home as if for the first time.