There is enchantment and amusement enough in this most amenable of Shakespeare's plays to make it a success even when performed by amateurs - so long as they manage to do something unembarrassing with the songs, of which there are more than in any other work of Shakespeare's: so many, indeed, that it is practically a musical. So you are entitled to expect an enjoyable night out with Rosalind and Celia, Touchstone and Jaques when they are professionally played, and by a cast with the depth and strength of this one.
      But what you get far exceeds even such expectation, for this is a stunning production, one of the best stagings of Shakespeare you will ever see. David Lan's direction, Richard Hudson's design, and above all the musical genius of Tim Sutton, have manufactured a consummate piece of theatre, of the kind that would convert into an addict any non-theatre-goer or non-Shakespeare lover who happened to step off the street and, on a whim, entered their Forest of Arden.
      Of course the magic would not work if it were not for the cast. A superb Helen McCrory as Rosalind and Reece Shearsmith as Jaques stand out, not easy to do among this all-singing, unimpeachable, delightful cast. The find of the evening is Denise Gough, a real star in the making, whose cameo as Phoebe is exquisite.
      Helen McCrory brings to her Rosalind a subtle, perfect balance between the girl in love and the witty youth - ambiguous, androgynous, saucy and demanding - who affects to teach Orlando how to fall out of love, while in reality teaching him to love more. She goes from the impatient anxious lover to the cross boy and back again, all mercurial emotion and quick intelligence, and is - as she pretends briefly to be at the end - the magician of the plot, whose fantastical changes of fortune seem quite plausible and appropriate in their work of ensuring that Rosalind and Orlando should be properly together at last. And of course with Celia, Silvius and Touchstone safely bestowed in matrimony, Duke Senior restored to his rule, Duke Frederick converted to niceness and tucked away in a holy hermitage, wither Jaques can go to moralise and be melancholy to his heart's content. A good story needs a good ending, and Rosalind provides it all.
An audience familiar with Shakespeare always feels a certain frisson of anxiety when very familiar speeches begin. Jaques' 'All the world's a stage' invariably sets the anxiety going - will it sound stale, flat and unprofitable in this its zillionth repetition? Not here: here the grim sense of inevitability and even futility that Jaques' is determined to impute to the very idea of human existence radiates strongly through, and it becomes not a hackneyed speech but a deep observation, rich in significance. 
      David Lan and Richard Hudson place their As You Like It in post-war 1940s France, where Tim Sutton found his music. The music is outstandingly good, and it provides the colour, feel, and framework for the whole. The conception works beautifully: the Forest of Arden is the Forest of Ardenne; the haunting and evocative sound of the accordion is the thread binding the action, and the songs are at last - perhaps really for the first time since Shakespeare's own day - a fully integral part of the play, and an essential part of the reason for the production's excellence.
AC Grayling