One of Shakespeare’s ‘most joyous tales’ is being approached very differently in a brand-new RSC production directed by Omar Elerian. Staged as ‘a play within a play’, Omar’s version of As You Like It takes place in a rehearsal-room setting and features a cast of RSC veterans - as he recently explained to What’s On...

A new production of Shakespeare’s comedy, As You Like It - which opens in Stratford-upon-Avon this month - is aiming to throw a fresh light on the story by featuring a cast of actors who are mainly over 70.
Directed by Olivier Award-nominated Omar Elerian, the show hopes not only to challenge the stereotypes around older actors but also bring something new to a familiar play by examining the idea of memory and imagination.

“When the Royal Shakespeare Company approached me about directing As You Like It, I was intrigued,” says Omar. “It’s a comedy, it’s a bit disjointed, it’s full of tongue-in-cheek references and jokes to the audience - but I didn’t want to do it in a straight way. 
“I was struck by reading the play how these ideas of love and freedom are normally associated to youth, and actually how I found that older actors, and in fact older people, were excluded by this vision of freedom and love. So I thought maybe that could be an interesting lens to look at the play. It’s a play a lot of people love and know very well, and whether this would be an opportunity to see something new, and whether that might unlock something in it that we hadn’t heard before.”

And so the production becomes a play within a play.
“There is a framing device... there is a company of actors who are coming together some 40 to 45 years after they last performed a production of As You Like It. But nothing is left of that production apart from the memories they hold of it - and of course their memories are very different.
“I was interested in this idea of conjuring a memory of a show, and how actors are able to recreate something that is not there, to make the invisible visible to an audience, and how quickly the audience can go on that journey of belief and conspiracy with the performers.”

The production begins in an empty space, a rehearsal room, where the actors try to recall the previous production and their roles. 
“By doing this, they little by little get back into habiting that production. Some of the elements can’t be there anymore, or just very simply the actors cannot do the things they were doing years ago. Or they are different people, and what they felt about playing a specific role or a specific line when they were in their 20s sounds very different once they speak those same lines or inhabit those same roles having had that lifelong experience.
“The idea is that theatre is a place where conventions can be challenged and a place of the imagination. Of all Shakespeare’s plays, As You Like It plays the most with this subversion of order, and class and gender and birth - and I thought one thing that we don’t see quite often is how perhaps age is a construct to which we apportion a social value as much as race or gender.”

One of the benefits of Omar’s idea is that the RSC has assembled a host of hugely skilled and respected actors for the show - many of whom have appeared in RSC productions over several decades. The cast includes Maureen Beattie, Oliver Cotton, Celia Bannerman, David Fielder, Geraldine James, David Sibley, Malcolm Sinclair, James Hayes, Robin Soans, Cleo Sylvestre, Ewart James Walters and Michael Bertenshaw. 
“It was a very beautiful and humbling experience being able to speak with so many actors of that generation, people I have looked up to for a long time. They were very excited - a lot of them are perhaps not being asked to play roles of that age now. And also for the opportunity to be in a room where you go through a creative process which is not particularly traditional, in which there is a lot of playing, a lot of improvisation.
“Many told me it was like going back to their roots as a younger actor and starting off and kind of learning the craft. So for them it was a case of going back to the roots of their work, being in this big ensemble company, this repertoire company, all over the UK in the ’70s.”

And they are supported by a cast of four younger actors.
“The meeting of these two generations on stage is very touching but also very playful and funny. I think that will be an added dimension of the production that I hope the audience will enjoy.”
Much of Omar’s thinking about the play was inspired by the famous ‘Seven Ages of Man’ speech - given by the exiled lord, Jacques - which sits at the heart of As You Like It.
“I was really intrigued by this play because Shakespeare in many plays mentions the craft of theatre - in The Tempest and in Hamlet - but the ‘Seven Ages of Man’ feels so much a declaration. When Jacques says ‘all the world’s a stage, and all the men and women are merely players’, it’s an acknowledgement of how the microcosm that Shakespeare builds on stage was his daily breath; as a writer, an actor, a company manager, he lived and breathed for it. 

“He just tells the audience ‘you are watching a play and you are watching the world.’ And the world as well can be a play, and the boundaries between representation and life can be very thin, and the emotions that we invest in these fictions actually help us to understand better our own real lives. 
“I hope audiences take away a sense of joy and wonder and playfulness. I think, for me, perhaps the playfulness is at the heart of what we are trying to do. It’s the idea that, regardless of the age and regardless of the status that we apportion to a piece of work or a writer, when we gather for a few hours in a space like a theatre, what we are there to do is to exercise our imagination and to regress in a way, to have this state of childhood. A state where we can really experience wonder and imagine something different, and then perhaps we are able to bring this back into the real world and our daily lives and approach them with more imagination, playfulness and openness.” 

by Diane Parkes