As You Like It is one of Shakespeare’s comedies. This means no stabby stabby and yes dancy dancy. Nuff said. It also features one of Shakespeare’s favourite comedy settings, the forest. The forest is where good people are exiled so that bad people can run about twirling their moustaches and shouting ‘Mwahahahahaaa’! tying people to railway tracks with impunity.
The forest is where strange and mysterious things can happen, which means that rustic peasants smelling of sheep dung can untie good people from the aforementioned railway tracks and frisk through the falling leaves with a ‘hey, nonny nonny!’ saving the day from the posse of bearded villains only to find out that they have been princesses all along. Hoorah for social hierarchy and down with dung!
It also means that Shakespeare can wax lyrical about the golden days of Merry Olde Englande where you could go out on a Friday night to watch some Morris Dancers, see some sheep wrestling, get the hay wagon home and still have change for some pork scratchings and a flagon of cider out of a groat.
And finally, much like setting plays in foreign parts it means you can get away with random plotting, tom foolery and unbelievable nonsense because the forest is magical and other, and it won’t really matter if you can see the join on the fool’s ginger wig, because they all dress like that down there. Don’t you know anything you town bred imbecile?
Before we can get to the forest we have to hie us off to France. This is doubly convenient because foreign forests are much more ridiculous and prone to ludicrous plot twists than your average English forest and less liable to have you up for treason should you mention that ever since ‘x’ got to the throne the forest has been a bit substandard and not at all what it used to be in the days of good king ‘y’.
Sir Roland de Boys was one of the original good old boys. Everyone loved Sir Roland. He was like Santa, Prince Charles and Mother Theresa in one lovable, manly parcel. Kind to animals, lepers. paupers and lettuces. Nobody has a bad word to say about him.
Unfortunately Sir Roland has turned up his doublet and hose and gone to the giant Duchy in the sky leaving behind him much misery, woe and woe. He has also left three sons, which as all good fairy storyists know, is a recipe for disaster. Oliver is the eldest and heir to the de Boys fortune, Jacques the second son, who has gone off to seek his fortune in sunnier climes, and Orlando, the youngest son who is at home hoping to finish his education and avoid the priesthood.
Oliver is what is known in the trade as a ‘problem’ child. The problem being that at the grand old age of thirty something he is still very much a child. He is absolutely sick to the back teeth of constantly being compared to his father and found wanting. ‘Old Sir Roland would never have eaten scampi in a basket.’ ‘Old Sir Roland would never have invested all his money in Sinclair C5’s’ etc, etc, etc day in, day out. All Oliver wants is a day when nobody compares him to his father and his younger brother to drop down dead and leave him alone.
The problem with Orlando is that where Oliver is gawky, cack handed perennially paranoid and riddled with jealousy (ever since the great tea tray disaster of 1587), Orlando is sunny, gorgeous, and very much resembles his late father. Everyone loves him, and the peasants are continually meeting round the back of haystacks to smoke pipes as long as their arm and bemoan the fact that Orlando turned out to be the youngest son, and wouldn’t it be brilliant if Oliver and Jacques went out for a day trip and had a nasty speedboating accident? etc, etc, etc.
Oliver has decided that the only way forward is to unmercifully bully Orlando until he either drops down dead or runs away. It has never occurred to him that Orlando might not oblige him by doing either of these things. He might instead get very angry and competent.
Oliver has a talent. His talent is for predicting exactly the opposite of what is going to happen. And despite the fact that the five acre field is now full of the littered corpses of Sinclair C5’s with chickens roosting in them, he never learns.
Oliver’s failure to send Orlando to school or give him anything to do except sit round contemplating his navel, has meant Orlando has had a great deal of time to spend with his poster of Arnold Schwarzenegger, some protein shakes made out of mangel wurzels and some weights. He has also been brooding. Brooding and weight lifting do not make happy bedfellows.
Our story begins with Orlando (ever the optimist) giving Oliver one last chance to turn from the dark side and do the honourable thing by giving him some money, some clean pants and a one way ticket to Eton. Oliver has seen Star Wars and has always fancied himself in black with an aqualung. This boy aint for turning. Orlando thinks about killing him, thinks about Yoda (in this case the faithful old servant, Adam, hovering in the background saying ‘your father would be sooo disappointed) and instead announces that he is taking up a career as a wrestler. So, up yours Oliver.
Oliver is conflicted. He has seen his grandmother, squatting over her needlework on a Saturday afternoon, hurling invectives at men in tights and leotards and twirling her moustaches. He knows that having a wrestler in the family is going to be another one of those no go areas for topics to be discussed at dinner parties. Just like that time they found Uncle Roderick in a pair of fish net pull ups. Socially this is bad news writ large.
On the other hand, Oliver is not convinced that his baby brother is going to be a good wrestler. In fact he is absolutely sure that his brother is going to be such a very bad wrestler that he will be squashed to jam within a fortnight by a man called Big Dave and this might just solve all his problems.
He ungraciously allows Orlando to pursue his new career on the understanding that he isn’t going to fund the purchase of new tights and lycra body stockings. Orlando hot foots it to the court, where there is going to be a big wrestling competition.
Oliver now does some brooding of his own and hatches an evil plan. Mwahahahaha, etc, etc, etc. He sends for Charles. Charles is the tip top wrestler for the Court and is to be the opponent of Orlando. Charles is nails. Absolute nails. The fact that he is called Charles and not Crusher or Mauler, and yet people still quake at his name shows you just how naily he really is.
Oliver mentions casually in passing that his brother Orlando will be wrestling Charles in a few days. Charles, despite having hands like hams and biceps dwarves could sit on, is not stupid. He feels that breaking the neck of one of the de Boys’ boys is probably bad form. He advises Oliver to dissuade Orlando from his fledgling career and suggests the church or needlework as suitable third son type career options. Oliver explains that Orlando is rather stubborn and will not be dissuaded, and that just in case he was feeling like pulling his punches, Oliver will pay him handsomely to snap Orlando like a twig as soon as he gets the chance. Charles is a bit taken aback, but never having quite fathomed the ways of posh people and fancying a bag of moolah he concurs and creeps off back to court.
Things are not too tickety boo at court. The court used to belong to a lovely chap called Duke Senior, a close friend of the delightful Duke Roland. In those days it was all jam and flowers and everyone got along splendidly until Duke Senior had a slight falling out with his brother Frederick.
Frederick hated jam and flowers and was utterly sick of the relentless niceness going around. He threw all his toys out of the pram and then threw his brother and all his followers out of the pram too, banishing them to the Forest of Arden. Then he renamed the court, Duke Frederick’s Court and installed rivalry, jealousy and hot and cold running wrestling the live long day.
Duke Frederick’s motto is: ‘Are you looking at me?’ His paranoia makes Oliver’s look like mere child’s play. There has been a run on cold compresses in the sanatorium since Duke Frederick took over, as nobody dare look each other in the eye anymore and keeps smashing into the furniture. It is all very exhausting.
Duke Frederick has a daughter called Celia. She is the only person in the entire world he doesn’t want to shoot and kill, but there are days when she pushes him to the limit. Celia’s best friend in all the world is called Rosalind. Rosalind, unfortunately for her and Duke Frederick, is the only daughter and sole heir of Duke Senior who is currently wandering around the Forest of Arden singing ‘Hello birds! Hello flowers!’ Duke Frederick has given in to Celia’s pleading not to throw Rosalind out of the pram as well, but he doesn’t like it, and is looking for the first instance he can boot her out to stay with her disgustingly optimistic father in a rustic ditch.
Celia is annoyingly girly. She spends lots of time squeaking, talking about boys and looking doe eyed. Her one redeeming feature is the fact that she loves Rosalind. Other than that she is an insipid female who would be quite happy to spend the rest of her life shoving out babies and embroidering monogrammed tea towels.
She is currently irritated with Rosalind because Rosalind is proving rather poor value as a friend. Rosalind, quite understandably, is a bit down about the fact that her father is now living in a hedge with his nearest and dearest, and that she can’t go to him and make him a cup of tea and force him to eat a nourishing bun. She is worried about whether he’s wearing a clean vest and the fact that when she doesn’t keep an eye on him he lives on kebabs and boil in the bag rice. What if he gets rickets? She will never forgive herself.
Celia thinks that Rosalind’s failure to be perky is rank ingratitude of the first water. After all she’s done for her, saving her from eviction, the least she could do is get a bit excited about boys. Celia has that Violet Elizabeth tendency, and when she doesn’t get her way the shrieking that ensues makes your ears bleed. Wise to her ways, Rosalind puts on her happy face and they settle down to a quick flick through Jackie magazine. They like the etching stories best. They’ve just got to the bit where Tybalt gooses Floribunda at the poetry reading when Touchstone hoves into view.
Touchstone is a clown. You have been warned. It takes him twenty minutes of ribald badinage to inform the girls that the wrestlers have arrived and that Charles has broken four men’s heads without even taking his coat off. Apparently the big news in the pram is that he’s now about to disembowel a handsome young nobleman who has the audacity to call himself a wrestler.
Hoping to see evidence of a six pack through his leotard the girls hot foot it to the wrestling arena. They are not disappointed. Orlando is hot to trot and the girls act in a particularly swoonsome fashion. Rosalind, who doesn’t usually go for men in tights is all at sixes and sevens. The lack of parental supervision, the constant diet of Jackie magazine and Celia’s squeaks have rendered her insensible and she falls like a sack of hammers.
They watch the fight.
Orlando has a lot to prove. He is also quite tetchy after his run in with Oliver and feeling virile because he can hear Celia and Rosalind squeaking away like the Von Trapp family mouse in the background. He pile on the pressure and mashes Charles into the ground. Nobody is very pleased about this except Orlando, and he’s too busy running round the ring shaking his own hand and winking at the girls to notice.
Charles is nursing his battered pride and Duke Frederick can’t decide who he’s more furious with, him for losing or Orlando for winning. When he realises that Orlando’s father is Duke Roland this settles his hash. He remembers a particularly gruelling evening sitting through Duke Roland’s shadow puppetry of woodland nymphs. He still gets nightmares now. Orlando is to be offed.
One of the courtiers thinks this is rather a poor show and advises Orlando to scarper. He takes his leave of Rosalind, who for once in her life is being more ridiculously girly than Celia and hot foots it back to Oliver’s to rub his nose in it.
In the meantime Celia is now pissed off with Rosalind for being too happy. She should not be allowed to fall in love first. It is not fair. After all it is Celia who saved her and it was Celia’s idea to fall in love. She is really having a crappy day. They are just indulging in a bit of a girly cat fight over whether Rosalind is being a bit of a prostitute by falling in love with a man in tights in the space of five minutes when a bad day gets a whole lot worse.
Duke Frederick, annoyed that his wrestler has been beaten into a bloody pulp, needs to do something to resurrect the dregs of his manly pride. There are no more kittens to drown, all the children are crying and that only leaves girls left to pick on. He hot foots it down to Celia’s chamber where he accuses Rosalind of looking at him in a funny way and tells her to get out of his pram or he will stab her pronto. No amount of ear splitting wailing by Celia is going to work this time and Rosalind goes off to pack her bag.
Celia is not having this. She will be in charge and she will not be parted from Rosalind come hell or high water. She wails and moans and carries on until she is sick into her own shoes and Rosalind relents and comes up with a plan. They will both run away. What’s more, they will both run away dressed as boys. And just in case they get into any trouble they will take Touchstone with them as their hired muscle. He’s the best they’ve got now that Charles is singing soprano and can only see out of one eye. They rush off to grow beards and work out which way round to put on a codpiece.
Back at the de Boys’ place, Oliver is utterly sick that his cunning plan has gone awry. He decides that there is nothing for it but to murder Orlando himself. He’s just had news that his boneless chicken ranch has gone into receivership and this is the last straw. He sends for his manservant, Denis, and instructs him to burn down Orlando’s bedroom as soon as possible. Denis leaps off to buy some firelighters from Cost Cutters.
In the meantime, faithful Adam has been lurking around in the background and has heard everything. He rushes off to tell Orlando that unless he wants to end up as barbecued ribs he needs to get going, stat. Orlando and Adam pack up their secret supply of Wine Gums and £3.57 in pensioner’s bus tokens from Adam and head off into the woods.
At this point the Forest of Arden is busier than Euston Station at rush hour on a Friday. All the animals have moved out and gone to live in Birmingham for a bit of peace and quiet. You can’t even nibble a leaf these days without some exiled nobleman leaping after you with a spear. It’s rubbish. Forest’s aint what they used to be.
Duke Senior is trying very hard to live up to the jam and flower arranging ethos of his courtly days but his men are not happy. If it weren’t for fear of Duke Frederick they’d have been long gone. Their doublet and hose is laddered, they’re sick of sleeping on damp ferns and the sight of charred venison is beginning to make them gag. It’s not exactly Robin Hood. It’s Robin Shite.
The only person who is really enjoying himself is the Duke’s funnyman, Jacques. Jacques is a nobleman who would prefer to be a clown. He likes being miserable and telling everyone how much worse it’s all going to get, and just to add insult to injury he likes to sing about it too. He is the worst ever Christmas dinner guest in the history of ever, ever.
We leave them singing and moaning and trying to be Fotheringay Thomas and check on the fortunes of Rosalind and Celia.
By now they have been in the forest for forty two seconds and Celia has already taken to her bed. She finally decided that she could not abide the thought of wearing a cod piece so she has dressed as a rustic milking maid called Aliena and has utterly gone off the whole idea of a bucolic peasant life style. It is cold, it is wet and she cannot stop sniffing.
Rosalind’s moustaches are itching. She hates the name Ganymede but can’t think of anything else except Dave and that’s no good. Aliena is getting on her nerves with her incessant whining and she is utterly cheesed off that Touchstone has totally failed to find his inner Ray Mears and is sitting on a tree stump nursing a grass cut and muttering under his breath about hot and cold running wrestling.
The only thing that has provided light relief up to now has been bumping into a lovelorn peasant called Silvius who is being read the riot act by the object of his affections, a young woman called Phoebe who is one of those hearty young women who has buried five husbands already and is only twelve. Silvius’ sixth form poetry is cutting no ice and she is about to mince him.
Just then a worthy old shepherd called Corin hoves into view. Ganymede/Rosalind falls on him like a drowning ladyboy sighting a life jacket and he makes their week by offering to put them in touch with his landlord who has a suitable hovel complete with sheep flock available, which Corin can look after for them while they swan about like Marie Antoinette, eating cakes and bedecking lambs with ribbons. They all gambol off into the distance with a hey nonny, nonny.
Orlando, in the meantime, is staggering through the forest with Adam whose legs have given up and whose bus tokens have proved worthless. They are starving and fed up. Orlando dumps Adam in some bracken and goes off to find some food. He stumbles on Duke Senior’s camp and tries to murder everyone for half a rabbit’s nose. They are not impressed. It has taken them three weeks to catch that rabbit and they’re not giving it up without a fight.
Orlando is in his element and it is soon clear that he is both a wrestling god and a nobleman. Mention of his father’s name means free rabbit’s noses all round, and his insistence on dragging the moaning Adam from his bunch of bracken gives him top brownie points and means that he is accepted into the Duke’s motley gang. It is not clear whether this is a good thing, but it’s the best offer he’s had all week and at least they’re not trying to barbecue him. Plus he finally has another use for his wrestler’s tights.
Time passes in the mysterious way of forests everywhere.
Orlando has now revived sufficiently to remember that he is also, as well as being in exile, lovelorn. He starts writing execrable poetry to Rosalind and nailing it to every spare bush he can find. This affords everyone great amusement.
For those who like their entertainment more dour, like Jacques, there are always the love lives of the peasantry to scoff at. On his melancholy wanderings Jacques has come across Touchstone who is trying to woo a whiffy young goat herd called Audrey. Touchstone wants to marry her, to which she has happily acquiesced. He does not want to stay married to her, because he is hoping to get back to court eventually and doesn’t want to take a whiffy young goatherd called Audrey with him. He has chosen a vicar of dubious provenance to marry them, so he can get into Audrey’s pants and then discard her when he is bored on the grounds that the vicar was a bit rubbish. For Jaques this is better than a triple bill of National Lampoons and some free popcorn. He is having the time of his miserable life.
In the meantime Aliena/Celia has discovered Orlando’s poetry and is taking great pleasure in mocking Rosalind/Ganymede with its truly awful nature. It is her only comfort. No man loves her. She has sheep lice and has to sleep in a run down hovel made of cow dung. The Golden Age is turning out to be made of pooh and she’s quite mardy about the whole thing.
Rosalind in the meantime is ecstatic and is dreaming happily of babies and wedding invitations. The slight hitch to proceedings comes when she finally runs into the young buck Orlando, himself. She has forgotten that she too is a young buck, Ganymede. She cannot therefore rush into his arms shouting: ‘Orlando. I am yours. Pants off. First one into bed sits on the wet patch.’
The best she can do at short notice is to convince Orlando that she/he is an expert in the ways of love and that she will cure him of his overwhelming obsession for Rosalind by pretending to be Rosalind so he can practice wooing and scorning her. They set about this with great gusto in a very homoerotic and comical way which is far too exhausting to go into now.
Celia seethes impotently in the background and Silvius suffers further humiliation when Phoebe casts her eye on young Ganymede/Rosalind and promptly falls head over heels in love with him, thus leading to more hilarious double entendres and sexually ambiguous hi jinks.
Back at Court, Frederick is annoyed that there is nobody else to throw out of the pram, so he goes over to Oliver’s pad to see if he can track down Orlando and give him a damn good thrashing. Oliver is suitably fawning but when it becomes clear that Oliver was trying to kill him first and failed, Frederick is not best pleased. He cheers up a bit when he realises he now does have someone to throw out of the pram and promptly exiles Oliver on strict instructions that he can only have his land back if he brings back the carcass of his dead brother Orlando.
Oliver is more keen than ever to decimate his pesky sibling and hoves into the forest, which can hardly squeeze in another nobleman without exploding in a leafy mass all over France. He spends his time being stung, bitten and crying for revenge.
Rosalind/Ganymede is now in a right state. Celia hates her for being happy. She hates Celia for being a right whinger. Nobody has seen Touchstone for weeks. Corin is driving everyone mad with his stolid refusal to get enthusiastic about anything but sheep and the whole thing is a sorry mess. She is sick and tired of waiting for Orlando, who is the most unpunctual swain known to man and all in all it’s a total mess.
She is just about to indulge in the biggest hissy fit in the world when Oliver flops into the olive grove covered in bruises and wailing like a girl. Celia perks up at the sight of another man. Another man who is clearly not a shepherd and who obviously doesn’t fancy Rosalind because she has a beard and a deep brown voice. She rushes over, flicking her hair and looking feisty.
Oliver gives them the skinny. He had given up all hope of ever finding Orlando and had gone to sleep in a glade when a lioness wandered by and tried to eat him. Luckily for him Orlando happened to be passing and karate chopped the lion in the wind pipe, but not before it took a nasty chunk out of his elbow. Nevertheless he managed to wrestle the pesky lion to the ground and save his evil brother from death by man eating beast. Oliver was so impressed he had a death bed conversion, repented of his evil brother killing ways and made up with Orlando by making a bandage out of his doublet.
Just like that all is well. Orlando hied off to tend to his wounds and Oliver came over to tell Ganymede what had happened. Then he swoons like a girl, as does Ganymede. Everyone bundles back to the shepherd’s hovel where Oliver and Celia promptly fall in love for lack of anything better to do.
Now it is Rosalind/Ganymede’s turn to be pissed off. She is sick of the moustaches, sick of not being able to snog Orlando and has absolutely had it up to the back teeth with Phoebe, who is now stalking her and mooning about outside her window pelting her with sweets.
She finds Orlando, tells him she is a grand sorceress and tells him to be at the glade tomorrow if he wants to marry Rosalind.
Everyone gathers for the sorcery. Rosalind rips her moustaches off in a very David Copperfield type way and because they haven’t seen civilization for months everyone is hugely impressed and gives her a round of applause and a balloon on a stick. All the lovers are reconciled. Audrey and Touchstone, Oliver and Celia, Orlando and Rosalind and Phoebe and Silvius. They all get married and are in the middle of having a jolly dance when Duke Frederick’s servants ship up.
People start booing and pelting them with sheep dung and wedding cake. They confess that they and the Duke were on the way to the Forest to kill everyone, because there was nobody else left in the pram to throw out and the Duke needed new entertainment.
As luck would have it, they met a monk in the woods who in the space of about two seconds (because that’s how long they’ve got now before Duke Frederick beheads them) managed to convert him to Christianity, make him repent of his naughty ways and convince him that the only thing to do now would be to give Duke Senior back the court and for Frederick to go and live in a hermitage once the forest was finally empty of all the pesky noblemen.
Which he promptly did.
Everyone gives three cheers for the ninja monk and prepares to go back to jam and flower arranging with alacrity. All except Jacques who decides to go and hang out with Duke Frederick in a melancholy way because he too has always secretly hated jam.
Fin.
