The experts agree that Shakespeare wrote As You Like It in 1599, about the same time as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing and Twelfth Night, all of which have challenging, central parts for women, roles that would of course have been played by a boy actor. It seems likely a particularly talented child inspired these parts and even today, it is the performance of these that largely determines the success or failure of a production.

No need to worry – in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production of As You Like It, which has just opened at the revamped Novello Theatre in London (the old Strand), Lia Williams is entirely up to the challenge of Rosalind. In long-limbed awkward youthfulness she’s believable enough to spend much of the play in boy’s disguise without being ridiculous, yet her emotions are always close enough to the surface that this is far from mere masquerade.

Yet she’s matched and balanced by Amanda Harris’s expressive Celia — played for laughs rather than deep feeling, but they are great laughs — and Barnaby Kay’s suitably leading man-sexy Orlando. I saw today’s matinee production, and the teenage girls in the audience definitely approved of the latter.

But you didn’t need to be seduced by youthful appeal to enjoy this show. To the purse-lipped elderly woman in front of me who complained I was laughing too loud (and she later accused the woman in front of her of wearing earrings that were “too sparkly”) – yes, this is a comedy. You are meant to laugh, and it is something you can be sure to do in this production.
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There are several ways of getting a political message across in a stage production. You can go for the worthy, straight approach, such as is seen now in The Exonerated, or you can make it an exciting, entertaining evening so delightful that the audience swallows the polemical medicine with glee and sits begging for more.

The latter is the approach taken in David Farr’s production of The Odyssey: A Trip Based on Homer’s Epic at the Lyric Hammersmith. This is a magic realist Odyssey, set in part in the present day — the gods deliver the great king Odysseus into the not-so-tender hands of a British immigration detention centre. There, to justify himself and his seeking asylum (although really all he wants is to go home), he has to tell his tale, which takes us on a cheerful romp through ancient myth and theatrical tradition, from the hippie island of the Lotus-Eaters, to the Indonesian shadow puppet-style of the seductress Circe, to the Dr Who style encounter with the lumbering giant Cyclops.

The word “trip” in the title is no accident, for this is a seductively psychedelic production. Sometimes this is direct: the intoxicating lotus flower produces in the immigration centre such gems as “the strip lights, they are wicked, man”, but often this is wrapped into the insanity of everyday life. The inhabitants of the centre sing increasingly tall tales of the disasters that brought them there, such as “a giant fish took my sister away”, before explaining the sad hyperbole, still in song, “no one believes me whatever I say…”

It is easy to keep piling on the adjectives of praise; for an evening of pure entertainment — with added thought — in London tonight, I can’t think of anything to better it. The acting, the staging, the profusion of ideas and images, the changes of mood and balance of ideas, all come together in near-perfection.
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By Jon Grant

In the First World War more than 290 soldiers of the British and Commonwealth armies were executed by firing squad, some for desertion and cowardice, two for simply sleeping at their posts. Many of these men we now know were suffering from shell-shock; they deserved treatment, not punishment.

Their fate, and a drive for them to be granted posthumous pardons, is the subject of an ongoing campaign. It is also an obvious subject for drama, but not, perhaps, for a children’s book, which is how the script for Private Peaceful, which has just opened at the Trafalgar Studios, originated. (The book, by the Children’s Laureate, Michael Morpurgo, has been glowingly reviewed.)

The story is about just one of these soldiers, Private Tommo Peaceful, aged 16. (He lied about his age to join up.) His life snakes through time like the trenches snaked the fields of the Somme.

Alexander Campbell, who is Tommo in this one-man show does, as far as it goes, a fantastic job. In the main, he performs the trick of playing multiple, believable, characters so well that the audience feels there was a cast much bigger than the actual number — one.
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I would really like to be able to recommend The Exonerated, a new production of which has just opened at The Riverside Studios in Hammersmith. Its politics are exemplary, the stories – told in their own words – of the six Americans who spent between two and 20 years on death row for crimes they were subsequently proven not to have committed, are appropriately harrowing and uplifting. As an evening of politics, it can’t be faulted.

As an evening at the theatre, however, it has a number of problems. Chief among these is the fact that here in Britain, this is a production that will cater chiefly to the already converted. Few if any of the audience members are like to be in favour of the use of the death penalty; few will be unaware that large parts of the American legal system are corrupt, racist and utterly untrustworthy. It has little new to tell them.

Particularly egregious examples of abuses — the account of the man who has just found his parents murdered, their throats slit, being forced to look at graphic photos of their bodies, or of the obviously intellectually limited 18-year-old black man browbeaten into confessing to taking part in an armed robbery that led to the death of a policeman, on the expectation of then being allowed to go home — might produce gasps from the audience, but this is a story that anyone who reads British quality newspapers is entirely familiar with.

The actors present a script derived entirely from interviews with the victims of the US “justice” system and from legal transcripts. Supporting this format, they are apparently reading their lines, or at least flicking over the pages, an action that is both distracting and annoying. The sound effects – slamming prison doors, buzzing electric chairs – are also heavy- handed and unsubtle. If we are hearing transcripts of words, they also make little sense.

While this method of “writing” has been used to good effect in several recent productions, here it runs into a serious obstacle. The convicted innocents are — inevitably in a system that relies heavily on money to determine guilt or innocence — the very poor, the ill-educated and those of limited intelligence. They do not always make their own best advocates.
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The Greeks liked to finish off a day of tragedy with a cleansing comedy; the medieval mystery play had little concern for stage trickery, content to have its characters emerge with their moral message from a quotidian frame; the early moderns liked to combine those moral absolutes with the more shaded themes of ancient Greece. It is the combination of these disparate statements about theatre that has inspired a joint bill of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Ben Jonson’s The Devil Is An Ass at the White Bear Theatre.

The former needs little introduction, but you could be excused for never having heard of the latter. It sat on library shelves between 1616 and 1972, and has been dusted off only once more since that date. If you can imagine a 1920s drawing room farce, crossed with a classic Jacobean city comedy, that pretty well sums it up – a convoluted plot and plenty of laughs, if you’d like the non-academic version.

Together, these make an interesting evening, a window on to overlapping frames of theatre history. And much of the production – and particularly the quality of the acting – is high-class. There are, however, a couple of irritating flaws.

First, the highlights: Richard Keightley makes a fine, tormented but human Faustus, see-sawing between high hopes and fear, while Matt Robinson is a broken-voiced, nearly shattered, impressive Mephastophilis. The clowning too is often well done: Andrew Shepherd, as Wagner, Faustus’s servant, might owe something to Black Adder’s Baldrick but is only the more fun for that recognition. Charlie Palmer as Robin, the peasant fool who is the mirror of Faustus – he steals one of the doctor’s books and thus manages to summon an irritated Mephastophilis from Constantinople, milks the laughs nicely, well backed by his companion in foolish adventure, Rafe (Richard Keynes).

And for a play so long on the shelf, The Devil Is An Ass, provided you don’t give yourself a devil of a headache by trying to actually make sense of the plot, is fun. It is even mildly feminist (although I doubt Johnson meant it that way) in exposing the vulnerability of Frances Fitz-dottrel to the financial ineptitude of her foppish, foolish husband. We meet him showing off his gaudy new cloak, the prize for allowing Wittipol (Robert Wilson) an hour of conversation with his wife. He thinks he’s found the way to do this without risk — his wife is not allowed to speak — but like all exercises of Fitz-dottrel “cleverness” this is soon overturned by his opponent and, it seems, he’s soon destined to wear the cuckhold’s horns.
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