We, the audience, were summoned into the Open Air theatre at Holland Park by a school bell - more willing than Jacques' 'whining schoolboy'.creeping like snail unwillingly to school' - for this is Shakespeare's great essay on romantic love. As You Like It is, to say the least, a difficult play to get right. The cast has to balance so much: the ribald wit, the underlying themes of melancholy and violence that are embedded in play for the comedy to work, with the gentle seductive magic of the Forest of Arden and the rambling plot. 
      From the moment we enter the auditorium, Robert J Williamson and Frank Jarvis signal to us that this is a performance that wishes to leave us with an elegiac sense of an England whose best times are in the past. A casual, rusticated set with hay bales, trellises entwined with climbers and gentle harp music played live, establish a mood for us. Set in the golden era of the 1890's the production immediately offsets this with the darker tones of the first act, a brooding Duke, the fraternal hatred of Orlando and Oliver, the balletic violence of the wrestling match. It is left to Martha Swann's rather ditzy Rosalind and Jenni Bowden's practical gentle and loving Celia to lighten the mood and embed the ideas of fidelity and courage in love that run through the play. 
      When the action moves to the Forest of Arden and we meet the exiled Duke and in his counterpart Jacques, we are introduced to a really innovative feature of this production: Jacques is a melancholic, purportedly Shakespeare's mordant portrait of Ben Jonson. In this production he appears in a cream blazer and white trousers, something of a dandy, and clearly a wit. Richard Keynes plays him for all he is worth. The Seven Ages of Man speech is delivered in the manner of an1890's beach entertainer - arch, knowing, clever and heavily emphasized. Effortlessly he slides unwittingly to the bitter lines 'sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything'. This speech, which is in fact a theatrical device to allow Orlando to fetch his faithful servant Adam, presages Adam's death which represents the death of old fashioned virtues and ways. Thus, at the interval the play is finely poised, and the suggestion of this production as one of an elegy for a past long since lost, is re-established. Love, which is to run riot in the second half, is underpinned by peaceful death. The magic of Arden is at work. 
      The second half of the production depends on Rosalind driving the action of the play forward. Martha Swann never lets the pace flag. As Rosalind/Gannymede she is a sharp sometimes cruel presence, whose passion for Orlando is unrelenting. She gives a startlingly modern ladette quality to Rosalind, and she shows her as a confident and determined manipulator of her lover, distressed by the trap she has built for herself. Swann is very ably supported by Jenni Bowden's Celia and by Gary Trushaw as Orlando, who often has to act as straight man to Rosalind's wit, or Jacques' mordancy. Rosalind and Touchstone, played as a cockney cheeky chappie, drive the play between them at breakneck speed to its hymnal ending. As You Like It is a play of intersecting triangles of love, and the production could benefit from these being pointed more subtly, after all it helps establish the balance and danger in love between fidelity and desire, When Hymen appears at the end of the play to bless each aspect of love the audience has been wholly captured by the magic of Arden yet again.
Wayne Jennings