I’d given up on seeing Jonathan Groff in the all-male production of AS YOU LIKE IT at Stratford as I thought it was sold out. But a friend recommended it, saying there were tickets, and there were. But there won’t be for long. It’s great. Funny and moving. The Forest of Arden a place where dwellers appear to sing Welsh folk songs in a way that touches something deep in one’s heart and brings out a profundity of feeling: beauty, pain, longing, hope, all bound up in four-part harmonies.
Jonathan Groff plays Rosalind as a human being rather than as a ‘woman’. Aside from putting on a dress at the very beginning I couldn’t detect any difference in his playing of gender when he was passing as male or female, the playing is all of the sentiment and in the situation, and unlike Sigourney Weaver in THE TEMPEST a few years ago, he’s learned to bring out the most of that gorgeous language Shakespeare has gifted them with. Groff’s kept his American accent but learned how to speak the verse. Fisayo Akinade takes a slightly different take as Celia – also playing the character but sometimes as streetwise black girl who knows her friend’s faults all to well and is not afraid to ‘read’ her. It’s a show that valorises feeling, but it’s also a comedy and the production is not afraid of camp. There’s a wonderful moment amidst all the coupling shenanigans were one of the characters in full drag bursts into Raye’s ‘Where is My Husband’? – ‘I want a ring, a diamond ring’
José Arroyo
