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by William Shakespeare, adapted & directed by Daryl Cloran

Bard on the Beach Shakespeare Festival, Grand Theatre, London

October 18-November 2, 2024

“All you need is love”

Whatever you do, be sure to see As You Like It now playing at the Grand Theatre in London. This is the acclaimed show from BC’s Bard on the Beach that combines Shakespeare’s comedy with 22 songs by the Beatles. Whether you see it as a Beatles musical or as an exciting take on the Bard, the show will likely be the most fun you have ever had seeing Shakespeare.

Director Daryl Cloran has relocated Shakespeare’s play from France during the Bard’s own present day to British Columbia in the 1960s. As You Like It (1599) is one of Shakespeare’s many plays to feature a contrast between two worlds. Here it is the contrast between the restrictive, authoritarian world of human society as represented by the court of Duke Frederick, here the gaming empire of Dame Frances, and the free, open world of nature as represented by the Forest of Arden, here the Okanagan Valley. As in the original, all the main characters are banished to the Okanagan and there set up an alternative society based not on money or possessions, but love.

AYLI has often been viewed as a de facto musical since it contains more songs than any of Shakespeare’s plays. The idea of a counterculture forming in the midst of nature with love as its guiding principle has led many directors to set the play in the 1960s. The Stratford Festival did this most recently in its 2005 production where all the songs were set by the group The Barenaked Ladies.

One of many factors that makes Cloran’s adaptation so much more successful is its use of music of the 1960s. Cloran has said he was inspired to use Beatles songs when he realized that their song “All You Need Is Love” could very well be the motto for the entire play where eight people enter the forest as unhappy individuals and gradually coalesce into four happy couples.

More than that, Cloran found that Shakespeare’s lovers move from a simple yearning to a more overarching view of love. This he found in the Beatles’ songs: “They [the characters] go from singing songs like ‘I Want To Hold Your Hand’ to meeting these philosophical people in the forest who kind of mirror the eventual complexity of the Beatles’ songwriting. It’s like there’s a nice parallel between the play and the Beatles’ journey as songwriters”. Indeed, the first song in the play is “Money (That’s What I Want)” (from 1959, not written by the Beatles but recorded by them in 1963). At the end the song for the god Hymen’s ceremony uniting the four couples is “Across The Universe” (from 1969, a song by the Beatles from their last album). The show concludes with everyone singing “All You Need Is Love”, which became the unofficial anthem for the famous Summer of Love in 1967.

Cloran admits that to add 22 Beatles songs to Shakespeare’s play meant that “I have cut A LOT of Shakespeare’s text to make room for them”. Yet, though the text is cut, Cloran has somehow preserved all of the best-loved scenes in the original, even if favourite individual lines have gone missing like Orlando’s “Just as high as my heart” or Touchstone’s “Bear your body more seemly, Audrey”. A major source of pleasure is how Cloran has chosen just the right Beatles song to suit exactly the right moment in the play. After Jacques remarks that she has just seen a fool, it’s natural that she should sing “The Fool On the Hill” (1967). Orlando on first entering the Okanagan with Adam and having no clue what to do, quite rightly sings “Help” (1965). But Cloran makes more ingenious use of the songs than that. When Orlando starts to flag when wrestling with Charles, the crowd reminds him that winning the match may lead to winning Rosalind’s heart since “She Loves You” (1964). Rosalind herself, when she begins to find that she has to repress her love for Orlando to maintain her man’s disguise sings “You’ve Got To Hide Your Love Away” (1965).

Not everything works. There isn’t much motivation for Jacques to sing “I Am The Walrus” (1967) or for Touchstone to sing “Helter Skelter” (1968). But, in general, Cloran’s choice and placement of songs is extremely clever, and it is constant delight to hear the familiar songs in new contexts.

It is also a constant delight to see how easily the cast is able to segue from Shakespearean prose and verse into Beatles songs and back. Unlike the situation at some Shakespeare festivals, the entire cast speak Shakespeare clearly and with real understanding. It is not true that everyone in the cast is as adept as singers as they are as actors, but it is impressive that so many are equally talented.

Chief among these is Jeff Irving as Orlando. Normally, Rosalind comes off as the play’s central figure, but in this adaptation, Orlando has equal importance and in Irving’s hands, becomes the most sympathetic character in the play. Irving beautifully signals Orlando’s falling in love with Rosalind at first sight, his anger at being denied the wrestling prize he won, his despair in posting love letters all around the forest, and his crestfallenness at seeing how quickly his brother becomes happy in love while he has yet to find Rosalind.

Irving, as anyone knows from his previous appearances at the Shaw Festival and at Drayton, is a fine singer and dancer. He puts his songs across with more subtlety than do the rest of the cast and performs his dance moves with more elegance. For this musical adaptation it’s hard to imagine anyone more suited to the role.

Daniela Fernandez is a feisty Rosalind, so feisty in fact that we start to wonder why she doesn’t reveal her true nature to Orlando earlier instead of forcing him to woo her as a substitute Rosalind. Fernandez has a hard, bright voice adept at putting across all of Rosalind’s numbers.

Naomi Ngebulana (she/they) is a genial Celia. Their strong yet gentler voice makes her a fine complement to Fernandez’s Rosalind. They are also adept at verbal and physical comedy which helps their Celia contrast with Rosalind’s singlemindedness.

As Oliver de Boys, the man who rapidly falls in love with Celia, Matthew MacDonald-Bain is excellent at appearing a selfish cold-hearted villain at the start of the play. This makes it all the more remarkable how convincingly his is able to portray Oliver’s 180º turnabout in worldview after just a short time in the valley. He and Ngebulana depict their characters’ falling in love at first sight with all the surprise and humour that entails.

Jan Alexandra Smith’s Jacques shows very little of the melancholy that the character is said to manifest. Rather her Jacques seems to mock sentimentality in others with a sense of amusement at common human foibles. Smith does achieve something remarkable in delivering Jacques’ great speech, “All the world’s a stage”. Far too often actors give the speech as if it were one of the Golden Moments from Shakespeare we all should memorize. Here, Smith speaks the familiar text as if it were brand new. She launches into it without fanfare and makes each new age seems like an idea that Jacques has just formulated on the spot. It’s this kind of great performance that should allay any fear some might have that Shakespeare is lost in the profusion of Beatles songs.

Nadien Chu plays both Dame Frances and Dame Senior, Frances’s older sister whom Frances has banished from court. Chu radically distinguishes the two in voice and body language. While her pantherine Dame Frances may be too harsh and given to shouting, her Dame Senior is gentle and distinctive enough to avoid being labelled an “earth mother”. The highpoint of her performance is similar to Smith’s as Jacques in that Chu is able to speak Senior’s well-known lines following “Sweet are the uses of adversity” as if Senior were describing each new joy in nature as she experiences it.

Leon Willey is very funny as Touchstone, but he makes his greatest impression in the Preshow Cloran has added to the play rather than in the play itself. The Preshow, which some may find a puzzling introduction to a play about love focusses on a series of World Wide Wrestling matches that will culminate in the one match which is in Shakespeare’s play between Charles the Wrestler and Orlando. In the first match of the Preshow, the odd wrestler Mustachio (Troy O'Donnell, who later plays a kindly Adam) takes on the massive Charles (Jacob Woike) and loses. The second match pits two against Charles, Swedes named Lars (Tyler Check) and Ikea (Henry Beasley). In these matches Willey provides rapid-fire, seemingly improvised sports commentary that is simply hilarious. The wrestling scenes themselves, choreographed by fight director Jonathan Purvis, are the most realistic and inventive such scenes I’ve witnessed on stage in ages.

Charles and three of his opponents, Woike, Check and Beasley, are all musicians who, along with Anton Lipovetsky, June Mirochnick and Isaiah Terrell-Dobbs, make up the excellent onstage band conducted by Ben Elliott that accompanies the songs. As singers, Beasley gives a lovely account of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (1968) while Check is marvellous as a John Lennon sound-alike in “Across The Universe”.

Cloran’s As You Like It works because it so thoughtfully put together and performed with such total commitment and enthusiasm from the entire cast. Their pleasure in performing some of the greatest words ever written and some of the greatest songs ever written noticeably raises the mood of the whole audience. If anyone needed a testament to the power of theatre, one need look no further. The show has already played to sold-out houses Edmonton, Winnipeg, Chicago, Milwaukee, Washington, D.C., and for two runs in Vancouver. We assume the show will move on to entrance ever more people here and abroad.

Christopher Hoile

Photo: Alexandra Lainfiesta as Phoebe, Jeff Irving as Orlando, Daniela Fernandez as Rosalind, Naomi Ngebulana as Celia, Matthew MacDonald-Bain as Oliver and Jenny McKillop as Audrey; Jeff Irving as Orlando, Daniela Fernandez as Rosalind; Nadien Chu as Dame Senior; Naomi Ngebulana as Celia, Matthew MacDonald-Bain as Oliver. © Dahlia Katz.

For tickets visit: www.grandtheatre.com.