Globe to Globe Blog: Jo Caird on As You Like It & Love’s Labour’s Lost

Tbilisi-based
Marjanishvili State Drama Theatre performed
Shakespeare’s sylvan, gender-bending romcom as a play within a play.
As the story of Rosalind and Orlando’s respective banishments,
their falling in love and the couple’s subsequent antics in the woods
was told, the company faffed, canoodled and gossiped among themselves
‘offstage’.

Creating
this added distance between the audience and the action was a risky
move but it ultimately paid off: the non-verbal business that went on
offstage may have at times distracted from the goings-on of the plot,
but it also offered non-Georgian speakers an additional route into
the production. In a subtle, yet tremendously well executed piece of
staging from director Levan
Tsuladze, the main action gradually took over more and more of the
entire Globe playing space as the play
progressed, until the ‘offstage’ actors were barely involved in
proceedings. Just as the audience became lost in the play, so the
players became lost in their characters.

While
the cast brought real joy to some of the play’s comic scenes,
there were moments when a subtler approach would have been more
effective. Nata
Murvanidze gave a rich and powerful performance as Jacques (the
cross-dressing adding another level to the play’s exploration of sex
and gender politics), but her “all the world’s a stage” speech
was undermined by the comedy played at Jacques’s expense
directly before it began.

The
production was full of beautiful visual moments that had audience
members reaching for their cameras – only to be told off quick as a
flash by the Globe’s hawk-eyed stewards. The
meta-theatrical setting, with its broadly 19th-century
design, made more of the space than other Globe to Globe shows I’ve seen. Some companies in this festival have given the impression that they’re just borrowing the stage for a while; Marjanishvili felt like they belonged here.

Striking the right balance between comedy and drama was also a challenge for Deafinitely Theatre, who presented Love’s Labour’s Lost in British Sign Language (the first ever professional BSL production of a Shakespeare play and a real coup for deaf-led theatre). 

The
King of Navarre and his noblemen swear that they will give up the
company of women for three years in order to focus their attentions
on study; shortly thereafter the Princess of France and her ladies
arrive at court demanding to be entertained; cue lots of falling in
love and confusion over misaddressed missives. 

It
is a fun and silly play – a production of Love’s Labour’s
Lost that took itself too seriously would be a hideous
thing to behold – and there was much to enjoy in the silliness of
director Paula Garfield‘s handling of the piece. But such was the
emphasis given to the bawdy, slapstick elements of the drama that
there was little room left for real character development or any proper exploration of the human condition.

A
few moments of sublety did make it through. David Sands was a wise
and conflicted Lord Longaville and Adam Bassett‘s precise,
understated characterisation made the Don Armado subplot a
pleasure to watch. Stephen Collins, who brought such energy to the
role of Colin in Graeae Theatre’s Ian Dury & the Blockheads
musical, Reasons to be Cheerful, gave a solid, if
unexceptional, performance as the King of Navarre; but the point at
the end of the play when he begged the Princess (a sassy Nadia
Nadarahaj) not to return to France following the death of her father
was beautifully played.

BSL undoubtedly lends itself well to physical
comedy, but the production would have been far richer had Garfield
trusted and challenged the audience with more quiet, emotionally
replete moments like this one.