This age-blind production of giddy “young” lovers lost in Shakespeare’s pastoral idyll pulls the rug from under us in more ways than one. Rosalind (Geraldine James) and Orlando (Malcolm Sinclair) speak of their youth and perform its romantic enchantments but represent an autumnal kind of love as well. We do not see much of Arden, to which they are banished, either, because the drama emphatically undercuts the theatrical illusions so central to the forest’s magic.
Much of it makes for warm, charming comedy with the most bewitching of casts who perform the verse with great fluidity, although the pace revs up too slowly despite a trimming of the text.
