[In the following review, Duncan-Jones offers a mixed assessment of Gregory Thompson's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staging of As You Like It, praising the principal actors' performances, but lamenting the director's emphasis on somberness and his gratuitous theatrical interpolations.]

As You Like It has always attracted adapters. The earliest performance record we have is not of the play itself, but of Charles Johnson's Love in a Forest (1723), which pasted bits of it together with extracts from several other plays, including Richard II. But this was one of Johnson's least successful ventures, running at Drury Lane for only five performances. Analogously, Francesco Veracini's baroque opera Rosalinda ran for a mere ten performances at Drury Lane in 1741, and has never enjoyed a major revival. No adapted version has achieved the box-office success enjoyed by many “straight” productions from the mid-eighteenth century onwards.

Gregory Thompson's RSC production looks at first as if it will be faithful to the Folio text, even fussily so. “Touchstone” (John Killoran) is not listed under that name, for instance, but as “Frederick's Fool” (he is called simply “Clown” in the Folio speech headings). However, Shakespeare's merrily inventive celebration of free speech and social tolerance has been topped and tailed with sombre extensions that make us feel bad about enjoying the comedy. They compromise the text's crowd-pulling power, and not only because we are kept in the theatre for three-and-a-half hours, which is too long for any Shakespeare comedy. It opens with a sequence in which Orlando (Martin Hutson) wordlessly and wearily chops wood against the background of a steep, wintry hill.

This goes on far too long and provides no useful lead-in to his opening reminiscence to old Adam. Fortunately, it is soon forgotten amid the physical excitements of his scuffle with his brother and then of his wrestling match with Charles, staged here to make weedy Orlando's triumph seem a pure fluke. More seriously damaging is the addition made at the play's close. Just as the audience are getting up to leave the theatre, the doubled Duke (Michael Hadley) comes front stage, kneels down, and embarks on a slow and solemn intonation of the metrical psalm “The Lord is my Shepherd”, in which he is joined first by his fellow hermit Jaques (James Staddon), and eventually by the whole cast. Shifting the hasty but convenient religious conversions of Duke Frederick and Jaques from the play's margins to its centre is a mistake. Shakespeare has already provided a three-part conclusion: the musical appearance of Hymen to “make these odds all even”; the speech from Jaques de Boys that ties up the plot's loose ends; and the outrageously flirtatious Epilogue delivered by Rosalind in her bridal array, in which she urges men and women in the audience to use their enjoyment of her play and closing dance as a warm-up to the sexual “play” that they will perform privately when they get home. The additional fourth ending, downbeat and religiose, is a dreadful anticlimax. It undercuts the triumph of Nina Sosanya's splendidly confident, witty performance as Rosalind, and sends us out with a nasty feeling that we have been preached at, though not by Shakespeare.

The play proper is boisterous and largely enjoyable. Sosanya's Rosalind is complemented by the liveliest Celia I have seen (Naomi Frederick) plus a wonderfully feisty Phebe (Natasha Gordon). Yet here, too, there are gratuitous additions, physical rather than textual. The Swan's small stage is jam-packed both with Colin Peters's set construction and the whole cast, who in middle scenes all perform as trees, then sheep, then trees again, and finally as Audrey's goats. Though their ensemble skills are impressive and often funny, the addition of so much non-verbal humour to the text seems more of a drama school stunt than anything that much enhances our engagement with Arden.

Orlando doesn't need a human forest onto which to pin his verses, since the set already provides three massive mossy trunks, and the congested mass of trees/sheep/goats often obscures sight-lines. A pretty and engaging rendition of As You Like It is struggling to emerge from this production. The colourful early Victorian costumes (Hilary Lewis) are a delight, as are most of the songs, especially the soulful rendition of “It was a lover and his lass”. But it can be hard to see the textual wood for the marginal trees.