A piano, prominent on an otherwise empty stage, is a clear sign this production will place sound at the centre of Shakespeare’s song-filled play. It is the first thing we hear and becomes this pastoral’s most constant voice, syncopating its comedy and heightening its romance. The lovers, outcasts and locals who wander through Arden tip winks to its composer pianist, Michael Bruce, and will him to “shut up” or to play on cue.
That mime is part of a grander concept behind director Josie Rourke’s delicate and delightful production, which finds a perfect balance between West End spectacle and Shakespearean purity. The speeches of love, friendship and loyalty between characters come with the physicality and intimacy of British Sign Language, as central to the drama as music and song. It is organically interwoven and brings the play’s intensities surging to the surface.
A lovably minx-ish Celia (Rose Ayling-Ellis) speaks to her banished cousin Rosalind (Leah Harvey) almost exclusively through sign, which sparks physical comedy and also genuine tenderness between them. It doubles up as their own secret language, of sorts, and their fellowship feels as strong as the love story between Rosalind and Orlando (Alfred Enoch), whose romance is giddy but genuine and both actors are naturals with the verse.
Robert Jones’s set is a deceptively simple magic-box: a single, dangling chandelier at court but the stage filling up with leaves as we enter Arden in a sudden downfall of foliage from an arboreal tangle above. The falling forest creates a beautiful world of russet strewn leaves across the stage.
The costumes change just as the scenery does, from gothic glamour at court – black, bejewelled Elizabethan dress, which looks like Alexander McQueen’s twist on ruffs and doublets – to countrywear. The set glows with Howard Harrison’s dewy light to build an intimacy that envelops the audience, too.
Martha Plimpton, as Jaques, gives the play’s most famous lines (“All the world’s a stage”) a freshness and gravity and every other actor shines, too. The cast list is accompanied by pronouns, which feels fitting in Arden, a wilderness ripe with discovery and transformation. Harvey (they/them) plays Ganymede/Rosalind with a natural fluidity and there is no change of costume in the final revelation, which leaves gender identity subtly open-ended. And it is through sound that the reveal is made as Harvey leaps on top of the piano and bursts into song.
“To liberty and not to banishment,” says Celia as she follows Rosalind into the forest. What an exquisite liberation this Arden is.
At @sohoplace, London, until 28 January
