It’s Shakespeare as you like it, but a bit too clever

AS YOU LIKE IT, Royal Exchange, Manchester

BACK when he was a thrusting young director, Greg Hersov might have chopped up Shakespeare’s most confusing comedy and given us something a bit light and frothy with a serious undercurrent — pretty much what the play actually is.

But this mature director’s production goes for deeper and smarter, with interesting but generally pointless technical trickery involving sound design, bird song and lots of hanging loudspeakers, plus a floor painted to look like a river runs through it.

It’s all very nice to look at and to listen to, and the show’s wandering troubadour, James Dey, plays some nice tricks of his own with layered sounds, created before us with the help of guitar and effects box.

But, you ask, what about Shakespeare? Well, I hope you do.

This, after all, is the play of two halves, four weddings and no funerals. There’s a first half of political shenanigans as, for no obvious reason, families go bad on each other and the losing bunch clear out to the forest and take their supporters with them; followed by a second half of rustic simplicity, comedy and singing (in this case like Mumford and Son), where girls and boys get together, and not always easily.

It’s a bit like Robin Hood, without the wealth redistribution.

After a lot of barging around, the last 60 minutes of the three hours comes alive with the romantic trysts and we end on a knees up.

The trouble is the two hours that come before that; rather patchy and uneven, ranging from wrestling to lovely Cush Jumbo (last seen as an engaging Eliza Doolittle), as Rosalind/Ganymede, dressed as a street boy with ridiculous Yardie street patois; as if anyone would ever mistake her for a boy.

But to be honest it’s hard to treat this as anything but a bit of Shakespearean fluff; ridiculous and silly, occasionally soaring to great heights as with Jaques’ (the excellent James Clyde) “All the world’s a stage” speech and the long and involved “arguments” speech of Peter Ellis’s lively Touchstone.

Performances are strong, from Terence Wilton in the three authority roles to Ben Batt as the deluded Orlando and Kelly Hotten as Rosalind’s spirited cousin — even young William Postlethwaite in his first appearance after drama school, clearly keen to follow in his late, great father’s footsteps. But my attention wandered at times.