The dare of its casting meant that Omar Elerian’s production was trumpeted long before it opened. Most of the actors in As You Like It are over 70. Actually, it is far from the first time that expected ages in Shakespeare plays have been upturned. Siân Phillips was a rapt Juliet at Bristol Old Vic when she was in her late 70s. Ten years ago Vanessa Redgrave, then 76, and James Earl Jones, 82, shambled rather than fired each other up in Much Ado About Nothing. In 2021, Ian McKellen fascinated in Hamlet at 82, though the production crumbled around him.
Elerian’s staging lifts off – against the odds, you might think, not least because there is an awful lot of chatter in the play about characters’ mothers and fathers. The action is purposefully, subtly refashioned. Set in a rehearsal room, with actors in jeans (dungarees for Rosalind/Ganymede), the cast are presented as gathering to remember a production they created when young. Their revisiting activates a pulse in the play itself. The first words are “As I remember…” I had never before realised how laden the speeches are with memories: of old feuds and friendships and lost relatives, of nearly foundering romance.
