Theatre: Chris Roper
When you take your seat under the sky for the opening scene of As You Like It, this year’s offering at Maynardville, you can’t help but be intrigued. On stage is an aerobics floor, three exercise cycles, a juice bar, and Health and Racquet Club and Reebok flags fluttering in the Cape wind. How are they going to pull this one off?
To tacky pounding dance music, the entire cast rushes on stage and sweats through a synchronised workout, complete with those irritating whoops of self-encouragement. Behind me, a disgruntled traditionalist mutters, ”I thought this was supposed to be Shakespeare.” Every year at these much-loved open-air productions, I wonder when I’m going to have to start making them up, but they haven’t failed me yet: it’s still possible to find a purist.
It’s a wonderful, rollicking opening, and a funny satire on the way that health clubs simultaneously represent the place of nature and the site of courtly ritual. The pastoral is plastic, and romantic love a function of sweat. When the tortured confluence of romantic intrigue plays itself out in the forest, you can’t forget the insight of that initial scene. As You Like It is the Bard and the Beautiful, a soap opera all about gorgeous bodies and tangled seductions. It’s also an intriguing interrogation of the fact that what we say is determined by our physical nature. When Rosalind is acting male, she speaks as a man, even to the extent of slagging off women in her loveprate to Orlando, and Celia (Natasha Lampropoulos) takes real offence to this.
Anthea Thompson is superbly protean in the role of Rosalind. As a man, she is totally believable, as a woman, wonderfully luscious and controlled. She manages to make the pratfalls and physical comedy very funny without sacrificing the dignity of her character. The audience laugh at her, but remain besotted with her complex portrayal. Her meek and halting epilogue could have been a little more forceful, but you could interpret it as Rosalind having the last ironic laugh.
Some folk will tell you that a Shakespearean play is only successful in proportion to the degree which it has been creatively mangled. Sometimes this can be as simple as a particular actor’s interpretation of a role, at other times as radical as Marthinus Basson’s hi-tech production of Macbeth. But this mangling misprision hardly ever extends to changing the dialogue. All the words are the stage, and the deconstructive action must play itself out on their pristine boards.
Director Keith Grenville is a lot more daring than that. The wrestling scene, where Orlando (Paul du Toit) defeats Charles (Anton Smuts), the duke’s wrestler, and impresses Rosalind with his cute body, is hysterically funny and amazingly exciting. Charles parades through the audience dressed in a tight red pro-wrestler’s outfit, pounding music playing, and accompanied by an entourage that includes a blonde moll screaming ”Charlie! Charlie!”
Not in the original script, but certainly in the spirit of doggerel. The fight itself is pure World Wrestling Federation theatre, and the two actors have to be commended for embracing this bastard branch of the thespian craft.
Another kind of mangling, and one which has traversed an interesting path at Maynardville, is the use of stereotypical Boere-Afrikaans and Cape coloured accents. A few years ago, this seemed to be amateurish lampooning. More recently, as with Twelfth Night, people (not me) have criticised it for being a tired and unnecessarily obvious ploy.
This year, on the lips of Audrey (Nazli George) and Charles, the accents take on an inevitable rightness, and make Shakespeare wonderfully ours. Even the traditionalist was weeping with laughter.
Paul du Toit is a great Orlando, sexy, slightly dim, and given to loud outbursts and precipitate behaviour. He is also capable of startling moments of romantic intensity, and in his scenes with Rosalind-as-man miraculously manages to convey touches of homoeroticism without any misplaced burlesque or dilution of his heterosexual appeal.
I wish I had enough space to tell you just how good all the other actors are. Go yourselves and applaud. As You Like It is funny, modern, South African, and it’s got a happy ending. Add this to the rustic pleasures of Maynardville, and you’re in for a treat.
As You Like It is on at Maynardville in Cape Town until February 24