As You Like It (The Curve, 21st March 2009)

I thought that Tim Supple’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream was an amazing piece of theatre, and this is why I booked for As You Like It at the Leicester Curve. The cast created some really interesting readings of the play and there was some very thought provoking moments. However, this was a very different production from the Dream. It was very earthy and the wooden stage was dismantled as the production progressed to reveal the wood chip ground of the forest. The floorboards become the trees in the Forest which is a very dark place. As the stage was steeply raked, it felt like the actors were playing on a bank or even on a hillside.

The Dream really moved into an alternative world, where the two worlds in Supple’s As You Like It merged into each other and were very similar. Supple’s production is brown and ochre it is raw and thoughtful. In the past when I have seen productions of As You Like It, I consider them to be like Alice in Wonderland in the that the play depicts a mirror world. I usually feel a real sense of characters moving through the looking glass. In this production, I felt that the characters just move to a different scene when they go into the woods. The world of the court seemed to merge into the world of the woods. It didn’t feel as if there had been a dramatic transformation, just a gradual transformation. That’s probably why I felt that Supple’s As You Like It was so different from his Dream.

This year, there will be the RSC and Globe versions of As You Like It to compare. it will be interesting to see how different the approaches will be, if different at all.

Information about the Production

http://www.curveonline.co.uk/curve.php?pgid=25

Reviews and Previews

FT.com / Arts / Theatre & Dance – As You Like I…
As You Like It at Curve, Leicester – Times Online
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The Stage / Reviews / As You Like It
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Review: As You Like It
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