Forbes Mason’s wild-haired Jaques comes to Duke Senior almost moaning about ‘A fool, a fool! I have seen a fool’. He doesn’t laugh, he is not so exultant. He reflects the Boyd’s dark forest; he is a man caught between wishes, unable to be a fool but uncomfortable as a melancholic. As he speaks, it is as if every line is added on in desperation to make Duke Senior laugh. He cannot do it.

Richard Katz’s Touchstone enters in a straight jacket, with a clown’s ruff and overlong shoes. His wild hair marks him as Jaques’s rival, but it is obvious both that his sort of clowning come completely naturally to him, that he could say anything and make it funny, and that Jaques is wildly jealous.

If Boyd emphasizes hunger, poverty, and desperation in Shakespeare’s play, he also plays up the sparkling wit and laughter, especially in Katy Stephens’ Rosalind. Stephens captures perfectly the quick-thinking garrulous Rosalind. She keeps talking and talking, saying whatever comes into her head, so long as it keeps Jonjo O’Neill’s Orlando near her. Whenever she shares the stage with him, whether as Rosalind or in her disguise as Ganymede, she and O’Neill look at each other with a thrilling intensity of passion.

But she nearly has to sacrifice her friendship in order to find her love: Mariah Gale’s Celia sits and looks on for much of the play, sometimes smiling, sometimes frowning. She is unable to enjoy much of the delights of Arden, torn apart as she is by love of her father and horror at his actions. For her, Arden is a place of frightening, dark dreams. She reacts angrily when her friend appears to be willing to turn her back on everything—friendship, womanhood—for a courtship that doesn’t really exist as long as she wears trousers.

By the end of the play the cruel winter is replaced by a summer of courtship. The bare backdrop has been opened up. Young men and women lean out of it, their dark Elizabethan dress having slowly transformed to light colourful clothing. Balance and laughter are restored as couples begin to pair up. The desperate shepherd of the beginning has been transformed to Hymen, god of marriage, bedecked with rainbow-coloured ribbons. Boyd’s production is exultant, seeking to prove that love will conquer anything.

As You Like It plays in repertoire at The Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon from 18 April – 3 October 2009.

Greg Hicks as Leontes, king of Sicilia, plunges terrifying quickly into jealousy in the fear that his wife Hermione, played by Kelly Hunter, is unfaithful to him with Darrel D’Silva’s Polixenes, King of Bohemia and Leontes’ childhood friend. Any fear that perhaps the switch from trust to suspicion was too quick is quickly forgotten in Hicks’ powerful portrayal of groundless fear. Hicks carries the play, helped by strong performances from Hunter as a spotlessly loyal and stately Hermione, Brian Doherty as a wonderfully funny (and smelly) Autolycus, and Noma Dumezweni as a noble Paulina.

Perdita, played by Samantha Young, was queen over the Bohemian, Arcadian festival before her entrance was called for: she entered hanging from a tree that was lowered down onto the stage, where Tunji Kasim as a very eager young Prince Florizel found her. She was the hardest of the actors to hear and played Perdita much more as a country belle than a royal lady placed in a forest; her Perdita seemed somewhat uncomfortable in her costume change in the last act. The young couple did not command sympathy as much as the elder generation.

I couldn’t help liking Dumezweni as Paulina, even though the last scene was played much differently than I expected or wished. Paulina’s protestations were hurried, frantic, as if she was hiding something, as if she didn’t want Leontes to be reunited with Hermione, as if Hermione were captive in some sort of voodoo magic, and instead of Leontes’ conscience Paulina were a kind of worser spirit. There was a humor in her franticness that was perhaps unneeded. Nevertheless the reuniting was touching as Hermione and Leontes wordlessly embraced; touching, looking, slowly, only slowly believing they were together again, and an increase of joy when Hermione turns to see her daughter.

The scenery captured the artfulness of the play. It opened with a Christmas party, complete with crackers, laid on a long table framed by two twenty-foot tall bookcases filled with blue books. When, just before intermission, Leontes’ jealousy destroyed all that was good in his kingdom, the bookcases crashed around him, the books tumbling out onto the stage and pages fluttering around his head in a suitably painful (especially for bibliophiles in the audience) image of Leontes’ new barren life, robbed of wife, of heirs. The books became first snow drifts in the cold waste of Bohemia, then leaves in the Bohemian forest, then the barren waste of Sicilia in the last act. Books too formed the body of the enormous bear puppet that consumed Antigonus; art in this production was capable of both devastation and of healing.

I haven’t seen As You Like It yet, but I am willing to bet that The Winter’s Tale is the strongest of the plays currently in repertoire at The Courtyard Theatre. Go see it; it was delightful.

All this said, the play while good was not great. Cassius and Brutus might have been the center of the play but failed to capture my heart. In their first scene together they stood and declaimed like Roman orators, but not like modern actors. Brutus’ speech “It must be by his death”, likewise, was delivered standing still, directly addressing the audience. There was no evidence of the inner turmoil the words betray, the fatal private musings of a rational man who has already made up his mind but almost shirks from acknowledging it. His pause after the first line was barely present; its effect was not allowed to fall upon the audience.

When Portia enters soon after, a screaming, emotional marital spat ensued. I had to wonder where was Portia’s stoicism? She cried, she screamed, and Brutus, who should have been quiet, his mind still unsure of his decision, not listening to his wife, nearly hit her.

Antony was stronger, but he was more the worn general of Antony and Cleopatra than the youthful carouser of Julius Caesar. He and Brutus might well have changed roles, as might have Portia and Calphurnia. Noma Dumezweni as Calphurnia was excellent, as she was in the role of Paulina in The Winter’s Tale; so too was Greg Hicks as Julius Caesar who was Leontes, who managed to show most clearly why the conspirators were driven to their fateful decision while being surprisingly funny. The spirit of Caesar in the second half was wonderfully spooky; and one of the nicest details in the play came when Caesar’s spirit killed Brutus even as Strato mimed that Brutus had run upon his sword.

I was not fond of the projection screen above the stage, which was put to good effect in projecting images for the weather but sometimes ruined the aura with what seemed like poor rendering of images but perhaps was just a strange conception. It drew attention away from the acting, and perhaps was a unflattering foil. But the rotating, semi-transparent screens that formed backdrop and doors for entrances and exits were breathtaking the first time they spun around. Actors could stand between to blend in with the projected crowd scenes, and a quick spin could change the scene and the tone quite effectively.

I suppose I ought not to have expected after the opening Romulus and Remus scene to see the sort of titan-like Romans I hear speaking when I read the play to myself. I was dissatisfied that Brutus and Cassius were not the monumental characters of Roman history. This was not a play that plugged in to traditional conceptions of what is Rome. It was bloody, it was dirty, quite the dirtiest Julius Caesar you are likely to see, almost as if the director Lucy Bailey (who directed a notably bloody Titus in recent years for the Globe) was trying to make Julius more like Shakespeare’s early revenge tragedy. It did not serve the lyricism of the play well, but nevertheless it is worth seeing.