There is no greater drama than that of learning to love. Romantic love is only one part of that drama, but in it, as in every partial love, we can see the larger drama at work. Director Polly Findlay’s production of As You Like It was especially helpful in highlighting the acute vulnerability and journey that loving requires of us. And this course, Understanding As You Like It, led by theatre critic and academic Kate Bassett, was particularly helpful in revealing the vulnerability and journey accepted by this NT company in offering us this depiction of love.
I will summarise the course, segment by segment, and thenconclude with my own thoughts, endeavoring to put As You Like It in the context of Socratic drama.
First, James Shapiro gave us Shakespeare in 1599. That’s when the Bard opened the Globe, wrote Henry V, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It, and started in on Hamlet. Then Shapiro gave us Shakespeare in 1606, when he wrote Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. And now Paul Strohm treats us to Chaucer in 1386, when he hit upon the idea and plan of the Canterbury Tales.An evidence-based study of one artist’s creative circumstance at one key creative moment. It’s a brilliant approach to a practical problem.
Once you have seen this, you will want to see every role that Patsy Ferran ever plays.
Originally, I had booked to see this production just once. But in Chichester, in November, I was convinced otherwise by a man sitting next to me throughout the three-in-a-day Young Chekhov festival. I took the guy seriously: he’s a total fanatic, who saw 160 plays last year and 135 the year before. He said that this is the best production of As You Like It that he’s ever seen — so good, he need never see another.
With operas titled Otello, Macbeth, and Falstaff, Verdi surely must have loved Shakespeare.
If there is indeed a Heaven (and let’s not get into that, just now) and if I should be admitted (we can skip over that one too), I would love to organise a colloquium that would be based on Plato’s Symposium, with the addition of a few other choice souls, including Verdi and Shakespeare.
