This is an edited version of a
document prepared in November 2011, prior to starting work on the project.
Like
Me is, simply, As You Like It without the politics, the
explicitly philosophical debates or the ‘clowns.’ In other words, it focuses
squarely on the six ‘kids’ – Rosie, Cecelia, Orlando, Oliver, Silvius and Phoebe
– and takes them to a farm out near Dubbo for a couple of days, long weekend
maybe, and throws them all in it together. Over the course of the long weekend,
relationships develop and blossom, truths are learnt, feelings made known and
affections made clear. In the end, though, who gets who? It’s not as simple as
it once seemed, not now anyway.
Before the film starts, Rosie is in a fight at
school with Charlie who said she was a guy. (We may or may not see this). So
she and Charlie were suspended, as was Cecelia by association. Four friends –
Rosie, Cecelia (Cee), and their friends Oliver and Orlando (Oliver’s brother) –
had long planned to go on a road trip together, and now that the long weekend
is upon them, now seems as good a time as ever to get away and find themselves,
discover each other. Silvius and Phoebe are also invited along for good
measure; the more the merrier, or so they say.
As we meet them – Rosie and Cee, then Orlando, Oliver,
Silvius and Phoebe (arguing, lost) – they find themselves on Orlando ’s family farm, a slowly shrinking
sheep run still pulling itself out of the recent drought. Besides the sheep,
there is a forest that runs down and along the border of the farm and it seems
the perfect location to set up camp… To paraphrase Chekhov, ‘it’s a comedy – three women’s parts, three
men’s – and is set in a forest (on a sheep farm) with a great deal of
conversation about Being and relationships, and five tons of love.’
Approach
As You Like It is a bit of a cornucopic delight, in that it has everything
Shakespeare has to offer – political intrigue and danger, love, mistaken
identity and/or disguise, a smattering of philosophy, songs, and the kind of
whimsy and mad-logic that he specializes in. In many ways, it’s not so much
concerned with a complex plot, or a plot’s complexities (as is, say, Hamlet or Twelfth Night), but rather the interactions between characters, and
the ways in which these interactions explore the play’s themes and issues
including, but not limited to, Love. I want to go to the wide open spaces, to run through the long grass
“with the wind in my hair, the sand at my feet” – or so the song goes; I want to
feel the golden summers against my skin, sit in the shade of the greenwood
trees, see the light of dawn and dusk and the flawless blue skies, see the
burnished glow of mystery in the trees and the dancing will-o-th’-wisp light of
a campfire… I want to make an Australian Shakespeare pastoral-romance to prove
it can be done.
*
In performance, the play – when performed in its splendiferous entirety
– positively sparkles and crackles with a diffused wit and gentle warmth that
is incredibly hard not to enjoy. But there are, as in most of his plays,
hurdles, in particular the characters of Touchstone and Jacques, and also the
language itself. Like Hamlet says to the Players, one must work to make the
speech seem natural, improvised, spontaneous, otherwise it’s no fun for anyone
if lines are just learnt by rote and declaimed or recited. Having said that, I
don’t really want to use Shakespeare’s dialogue in this version, but rather
keep the spirit of it and the play intact, and ‘improvise’ around it, inserting
choice phrases where the occasion suits.
Even though the play is a musical one – as in having more songs than
any other Shakespeare play – I don’t want to turn this into a musical, a la Moulin Rouge! or Singin’ In The Rain. I’m interested in having one or two
characters/actors being able to play instruments – acoustic guitar, harmonica
perhaps – and diegetically incorporate it into the scenes as naturally as
possible, as love songs, a carouse around the campfire, and general
music-making that happens along the way.
The whole point of this exercise is not to
modernise the story or Australianise it to the point of cultural cringe or to
the detriment of Shakespeare’s original text; the idea is to take Shakespeare’s
play, his language, his characters and his scenarios, and apply them to a group
of six modern Australian kids (17 or 18 year olds) and see what happens. Names
can be changed, sexual orientations are no longer fixed, certain or given, and
neither are genders – just because a character is written as male doesn’t mean
they stay that way.
Talking
to Liz, my co-creator and -realiser, we both agree that it’d be really interesting to get a transgender
character in there, played entirely straight and “with no farce beyond that of
them gender-bending from that point, i.e. trans-girl dresses as boy &c.”
And that’s the thing: the play already does it, albeit
not-quite-unintentionally, plays the gender-bending angle, and plays it
straight, just as I want to. Shakespeare did it brilliantly back in the 1590s
(under and within different socio-cultural constraints), so I can’t see any
reason why we shouldn’t stop or change it now.
To compound upon this, I don’t necessarily want
the ending to be clean-cut hetero-pairing; if it is at all possible in the
final realization, it’d be interesting to see if Rosie could not go with a guy,
but with a girl and see whether it changes or adds anything. And Rosie in
disguise (i.e. as ‘Ganymede’) should not be played as an exaggeration; she
should just be played as herself in men’s clothing – playing the gender-bending
angle, but playing it straight. Because “As You Like It …is not about
sexuality – hetero-, homo-, bi- or trans- – but about love, which transcends
sexuality and includes it.” (Hodgdon: 2002, 194)
John Bell believes that “Shakespeare is much wilder and freer than
anything you can shoehorn into a particular period,” which is why anything is
possible in Shakespeare. I don’t like the almost-sacredness that surrounds
Shakespeare at times, the reverence that people seem to have which prevents
radical and different interpretations (Benedict Andrews’ falling confetti
notwithstanding); “if you’re going to make your mark, you want to knock [the
plays] around a bit. But it should come out of a love for these plays, not
contempt. You want to shake the dust off, not wreck them,” John Bell concludes.
(Blake: 2011, 7)
That said, there is one important obstacle with this conceptualization.
Shakespeare’s play works so well because you’re always on the move between
types of people; it’s like you’re watching a film and you’re always cutting
between locations or groups of people, and sometimes they mix but it’s not
common, only when a point wants/needs to be made. And that’s the thing – half
the play is concerned with love, while the other half is a kind of
philosophical ramble, largely on the part of Jacques, the melancholic ‘fool.’
(Rosalind has her fair share of philosophical pondering, but it’s pretty much
always in conversation with someone.) So the question is, do I cut Jacques and
Touchstone and all the foresters for better or worse and incorporate the feel
of their lines in with the kids, or do I have them come on as workers on the
farm, as observers outside the kids’ sphere?
For me, personally, the character of Rosalind is pretty much one of
the best – if not, The Best – characters that Shakespeare ever wrote. She’s
kind of like the girlfriend or boyfriend we all wished we could meet, in that
she not only falls for a person but she doubts the very feelings and questions
their veracity; no sooner has she met the person she has fallen for does she
pretend to be someone else, and through the course of the play – by
role-playing her love for the guy with the guy himself – she comes to know more
about love, comes to know herself better and thus decides that she really does
love the boy in question. Ergo, she finds herself through her disguise.
I think Rosalind is kind of a substitute for Shakespeare – at least
in As You Like It – and is also the
stage manager, orchestrating deceits and happenings, making sure everything
happens to a schedule or plan, and making sure everything works out in the end,
in that marvelously life-affirmingly Shakespearean way.
I don’t think it’s totally necessary for Rosalind to play the ‘male’
character of Ganymede as a male, that is to conform to the stereotype of male
actions and attributes. It’s not necessary to point out to an audience ‘look,
I’m in disguise. I must act as a man now’; it’s not that at all. The whole
point of her disguise is so that Orlando
…Rosalind is part waif, part tomboy, a naïve, gawky
girl who can mug and fool, tickle an irritating friend, but also play
purposeful games when the time comes. With that bewildered heart-throb Orlando,
you feel she is testing the sexual waters, readying herself for a plunge that
may one day end her, as she claims, ‘fathoms deep in love’…
[The Times (London
Part of the attraction to Rosalind for me comes from the way that
she is so completely in control of everything, yet is so completely not
simultaneously; she is altogether the stage manager and love’s pawn, moving
others around a chessboard before she herself is moved. In this way, I believe
Rosalind to be a substitute for Shakespeare who, as an actor, playwright and
shareholder in the Globe theatre, knew more about life in all its multitudinous
guises than anyone before or since. “Let
it suffice to affirm that no one else in the plays, not even Falstaff or
Hamlet, represents Shakespeare’s own stand towards human nature so fully as
Rosalind does. If we can point to his unshadowed ideal then it must be to Rosalind.
His ironies, which are Rosalind’s, are subtler and more capacious than ours,
and more humane also.” (Bloom: 1998, 209)
In this vein is also my first real encounter with Rosalind, at least
as a performance. Kenneth Branagh filmed As
You Like It for the BBC and HBO in 2006 (and it is, in my opinion, his best
Shakespeare-film), and cast Bryce Dallas Howard as Rosalind. I think, in many
ways, she is ‘my’ Rosalind, just as people talk of ‘their’ Doctor [Who]: she’s
smart, witty, cute, sexy, believably boyish at the same time as being
undoubtedly feminine, and she has a confidence and naturalism about her that
makes you just kind of fall in love with her, as you’re meant to. “The naturalness, the unforced understanding of
her playing, the passionate, breathless conviction of it, the depth of feeling
and the breadth of reality – this is not acting at all, but living, being,
loving…” (Shakespeare: 2010, 133)
There’s more to ‘being’ a boy or man than the clothes and the
mannerisms; even though, as in Hamlet,
“the clothes maketh the man,” they can only help so far. What you’ve got to do
is think like a man, and the rest of the body will follow, or so the adage
goes. In the case of Rosalind, she’s trying to find herself within ‘Ganymede’
at the same that Orlando
Harold Bloom, a critic whose book Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
is something akin to a bible in Shakespeareanism, asks “when Ganymede plays
Rosalind in order to rehearse Orlando
in life and love, are we to assume that her lover does not recognize her? Aside
from straining credulity, it would be an aesthetic loss if Orlando were not fully aware of the charm of
his situation.” (Bloom: 1998, 221)
Personally, I’m in two minds about this.
Initially, when Orlando and Rosalind-as-Ganymede meet in the forest, I think he
doesn’t recognise her, or at least not initially; he sees her as a boy, or a
rather feminine boy who he is capable of believing is his Rosalind. If he did
know her to be Rosalind in the first, you wouldn’t have a lot of the beautiful
sparring and whimsical exchanges they share. But as the play progresses, I do
think he becomes aware of the fact, that he can see through her disguise, no
matter how good her act is or how good the disguise is. However: as Orlando and
Rosalind-as-Ganymede enter the final scene [5.4], I do think he is aware of who
she is (and the text supports this), otherwise the magic is lost and Orlando is
not only behind the audience who have been complicit in the disguise from the
first, but is also not worthy of Rosalind’s affection, love and future; if he
doesn’t know who she is by the end of the play, he is not her equal, and
therefore the whole play has been a waste. The view that I subscribe to is that
Rosalind’s act falters enough in the ‘bloody handkerchief’ scene [4.3]; when
Oliver picks her up after she “counterfeited to swoon,” he discovers who she is
through the simple act of physical contact, and he tells Orlando, whose
suspicions – assumptions – are confirmed; consequently, he plays along with her
when she talks of knowing a magician “since I was three year old,” and talks of
being able to produce his Rosalind tomorrow, “should ever I marry man, and I
will be married tomorrow.”
At the end, at the various weddings – or, in
this version, the partings and journey back to the city – I think Orlando
should be acting his surprise and annoyance at being duped by Rosalind, kind of
getting his own back at her, if you will; then and only then, do they know they
are compatible for – with – each other, and that the play’s events have not
been for nothing.
If Rosalind
cannot please us, then no one in Shakespeare or elsewhere in literature ever
will. I love Falstaff and Hamlet and Cleopatra as dramatic and literary
characters, but would not want to encounter them in actuality; yet falling in
love with Rosalind always makes me wish that she existed in our subliterary
realm. (Bloom: 1998, 204)
There is no way to conclude this, and I have tried; like Life, it
just keeps going and going and going. I could quote critics and theorists until
my heart is content, but that won’t do anything apart from show how many crazy theorists
I’ve read, digested and assimilated into my view of the play, how many books
and articles I’ve read on the subject.
The issue at the heart of As
You Like It is the idea of playing, the act of playing, the ‘le jeu’ that
Jacques Lecoq talks about (thank you Year 12 Drama). Unlike Viola-Cesario in Twelfth Night (her counterpart), Rosalind-as-Ganymede is the play, (Hodgdon
: 2002, 190) and the whole issue –
game, question, theme, crux – is right there in the title: As You Like It. ‘It’ implies that some
people may like the same things but in different ways. There are and should be
no judgements on what you like, nor nothing to found them on. As she suggests
in the Epilogue, “ladies may like it (‘it’ being, ostensibly, the play) in a
different way from men.” (Rosenbaum : 2006, 498) (And ‘it’ being Shakespeare, nothing ever has just one ‘straight’ meaning.)
Ultimately, Rosalind’s – and, indeed, the play’s – power comes from
how believable a boy she is (not necessarily how convincing her disguise is,
either to the audience and or Orlando), and whether or not (and to what extent)
you fall for her, either as Rosalind or as Rosalind-as-Ganymede. I for one well
and truly did. And it – she, that; it – is just as I like it.
~
Ackroyd, Peter. Shakespeare: The Biography. London
Bell, John. On Shakespeare. Sydney
Blake, Jason.
"Brush up Your Shakespeare." The
Sydney Morning Herald, 22-23/10/2011, 6-8.
Bloom, Harold. Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.
London
Flaherty, Kathryn.
"As You Like It: Re-Imagining Arden
Hodgdon, Barbara.
"Sexual Disguise and the Theatre of Gender." In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespearean Comedy, edited by
Alexander Leggatt. Cambridge , UK : Cambridge
University
Kott, Jan. "The
Gender of Rosalind." New Theatre
Quarterly 7, no. 26 (1991): 113-25.
———.
"Shakespeare's Bitter Arcadia Methuen : London
Rosenbaum, Ron.
"Looking for Love in 'As You Like It'; Looking for an Orgasm in 'Romeo and
Juliet'." In The Shakespeare Wars:
Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups. New York
Shakespeare, William.
"As You Like It in Performance: The Rsc and Beyond." In As You Like It, edited by Jonathan Bate
and Eric Rasmussen. Hampshire ,
UK
———. Hamlet. Edited by Philip Edwards, The
New Cambridge Cambridge : Cambridge University
Traub, Valerie.
"The Homoerotics of Shakespearean Comedy." In Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama.
London
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