As You Like it Reviews
Poets' rep. from London, UK
THE HORROR, THE HORROR!
I used to say I'd never seen a bad production at the National. Not any more. So fundamental was the director's misunderstanding of this play, so gross the designer's rendering of the Forest of Arden's "desert" (dangling metal and clinker) that there was nothing the actors (even the divine Patsy Ferran) could do to enliven the sense of death hanging over it. Here we had death of subtlety, death of any sense of language, death of anything but the grossest slapstick comedy, and above all death of poetry, with the play's second most famous set of lines chopped carelessly, pointlessly to pieces. It was, in the end, a "toad, ugly and venomous", but lacking any sort of "precious Jewel" in its head, or anywhere else for that matter. Adversity indeed.
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