[In the following review, Macaulay dismisses Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of As You Like It as tedious, censuring Doran's uninspired direction, numerous shallow performances, and the musical accompaniment.]

As You Like It can cast so many different lights and can show so many depths (“my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal”): how come the Royal Shakespeare Company keeps giving it one prettily lightweight and simple-minded production after another?

Gregory Doran's new RSC production is quaintly pretty-pretty tourist-fodder. As designed by Kaffe Fassett and Niki Turner, the Forest of Arden is punctuated by 2-D trees with luminous leaves, and with piles of huge bright tapestry cushions on the patterned floor beneath. In male disguise as Ganymede, Rosalind wears a sweater of the same elaborate patterning.

Doran can do serious: viz. Timon of Athens at the Barbican. In spite of a callow Merchant of Venice, he has grown in recent seasons into an accomplished Shakespeare director. And I have seen productions of As You Like It which were far more wrong-headed and far uglier. His is an inoffensive staging. So why am I offended by it?

Largely because it is a stunning disappointment to see Alexandra Gilbreath—who has made striking impressions in two leading roles in two recent Doran productions—give us a Rosalind so limited and so mannered. Gilbreath has grown up chiefly with the RSC. She has force, originality, spontaneity, and lustre: the “Watch me” quality of the natural star. But she has also alarming vocal limitations: shallow breathing, a tight and throaty vocal tone, and a ludicrous Mae West habit of nudging the final word of a line and then sliding down it. However, she has occasionally curbed this habit, and it was to be hoped that the RSC, with its famed voice department and verse-speaking classes, would help her to free up her voice for this 2000 season, in which she tackles not only Rosalind but also (from June to October) Juliet.

Alas, her whole conception of Rosalind is shallow, twinkly-bright, and audience-biased. The way she faints neatly to face the auditorium sums up her whole performance. To be ingenuous, she lets her mouth hang open a lot; to be adorable, she keeps smiling and turning her bright eyes and choirboy face to the light. How many fathoms deep is she in love? About one inch; her affection is a puddle.

Her vocal mannerisms have become maddening. Her squeezed way of speaking has too little variation for a long role like this. It actually deprives her of spontaneity: by the time she delivers the Epilogue, we know her all too well—and we have stopped believing a word she says. Playing Celia beside her, Nancy Carroll, a young actress of very little experience, makes an altogether more authoritative impression: not least because, with a clear voice and effortless attack, she makes simple music and artless eloquence from her lines.

Just how often does this production disregard the text? Anthony Howell makes an attractive, sober and arresting Orlando, but it is nonsense to say that he has a “nimble wit”. Gilbreath/Rosalind is by no means “more than common tall”, especially beside a taller Celia. As Phebe, Daniella Tilley—who, like David Acton as Sir Oliver Martext, overacts outrageously—does not have “black silk hair” but a curly auburn mane. Declan Conlon is a dull, reasonable Jacques: he turns the most original lines to tedium.

Django Bates's music—scored with vile cheap-mindedness—is among the production's shallowest ingredients. Will I ever see Orlando win the wrestling match by fair play? In this production, his victory is particularly unsporting. Odd, amid this production: a production in general so harmless that it is an effort to stay awake in it.