1623 artistic director Ben Spiller shares his thoughts on the stage and screen histories of Shakespeare's popular comedy As You Like It.

The following is a transcript of Ben's introduction to a performance of As You Like It, staged and filmed live at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in Summer 2009 and screened at Derby QUAD in November 2010.

Good evening, ladies and gentleman, and welcome to QUAD. My name is Ben Spiller and I'm the artistic director of 1623 theatre company, based here in Derby.

At 1623, we approach Shakespeare unusually and often perform his plays, or parts of them, in unusual places. Discovering new ways of connecting people to the playwright’s inspirational language, vibrant characters and exciting sense of theatre is what makes us tick. 

For example, last autumn, we performed Emergency Shakespeare! - a collection of perilous scenes from four of Shakespeare's plays - in and around the building here at QUAD, where volunteers from St John Ambulance stepped in to offer first-aid solutions. The production was revived this summer at the National Theatre as part of the Watch This Space Festival, before it won Best Live Event at the Creative Industries Network 2010 Awards. 

The relationship between 1623 and QUAD has developed significantly since Emergency Shakespeare! last year, as we're going to make our home here throughout 2011. We're excited at the new possibilities that being based at an international arts centre - specialising in visual art and film - will create for further innovations in Shakespearean production. 

This evening, something unusual, exciting and innovative is going to happen, as two distinct performance histories of Shakespeare's As You Like It - those of stage and screen - will come together in a single event. The early Edwardians tried something similar by filming short sequences from the play (as well as others by Shakespeare), but the 2009 Shakespeare's Globe Theatre production, which we're going to experience shortly, marks the first time that the full play has been made accessible on both stage and big screen simultaneously. 

Before we sit back and enjoy one of Shakespeare's wittiest and most sophisticated comedies - and let's remember, As You Like It is a comedy; so, if the actors don't make you laugh, they're not doing their job properly - I'd like to share with you a little of what I know about the stage and screen histories of the play. Then we'll watch the two merge together. Exciting! 

We're not sure exactly when As You Like It was first performed on stage, but there are clues. A couple of lines from Christopher Marlowe's poem Hero and Leander - first printed in 1598 - turn up in Shakespeare's play and the music and lyrics from one of the songs - "It was a lover and his lass" - were first published in 1600. It seems, then, that the play was written at some point between 1598 and 1600; but was it performed then, too? 

It's quite romantic to think that As You Like It was the first play performed at the original Globe Theatre, newly-opened in 1599 (not far from where the reconstructed Globe is today), because the motto of the playhouse - Totus mundus agit histrionem - also appears in the play, albeit translated into English: "All the world's a stage". 1599 certainly matches up with the dates of Marlowe's poem and the song; but there's also the possibility that the play was never performed in Shakespeare's lifetime. Why might that be, then? 

To get a play produced in the Elizabethan theatre, you had to submit it to - and have it approved by - the Master of the Revels, who was employed by the queen to ensure that nothing in the play was politically challenging, satirical or questioning of the court, or had the potential to incite civil unrest. Attempts to produce a play that did some or all of the above often ended in the playwright being arrested, fined or even executed. 

As You Like It, Shakespeare creates a court that's ruled with an iron fist by the unpredictable, angry Duke Frederick who has betrayed his brother by usurping him before banishing Rosalind - his niece - on pain of death for no reason other than she reminds him of his exiled brother. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the court, the scheming Oliver sets up a wrestling match between his virtuous brother Orlando and the professional fighter Charles in the hope that his brother will be killed. 

Queen Elizabeth's court in the late 1590s was also riddled with paranoia and fear. The monarch was in her late sixties and childless, so she was likely to die soon without an heir to the throne. The future of the English monarchy and, indeed, of England itself was difficult to predict. Furthermore, there was talk of a rebellion on its way from Ireland and the Earl of Essex - in charge of suppressing the Irish - had betrayed his queen and country by taking leave of his duties without permission. These were uncertain and troubled times. 

Several characters in As You Like It, Rosalind and Orlando included, seek refuge from the court in the Forest of Arden, where it is rumoured that the usurped duke and his followers live like hippies, or Robin Hood and his merry men. Shakespeare presents the countryside as a much safer, less frightening place than the envious, paranoid court. So, after having created a terrifying court from which characters flee to the country to survive, did he, perhaps, think twice about handing over his play to the Master of the Revels? 

Furthermore, there is no record of the play having been published in Shakespeare's lifetime. If an Elizabethan play proved popular in performance, then the script was often printed and sold to eager audience members; why, then, did As You Like It not reach print? Was it because the play had not been performed at the Globe or, indeed, anywhere? There is the possibility that the play was performed and it just wasn't popular enough to merit publication, but the opportunity to buy a copy of one its songs in 1600 seems to suggest otherwise. 

As You Like It was finally published in 1623 - seven years after the playwright's death - when two of his fellow actors arranged for the creation of the first edition of Shakespeare's complete works. While it seems we'll never know for certain whether or not As You Like It was performed on the Elizabethan stage, we know without doubt that it was a very popular play in the Restoration theatre, mainly down to its sparkling heroine Rosalind. For the first time in history, women were allowed to perform - legally - and the witty, intelligent, confident role of Rosalind was the perfect vehicle to showcase the talents of the first generation of actresses. The presence in the play of Celia, daughter to the usurping duke and Rosalind's loyal cousin who stays by her side in both court and country (though not without keeping her cousin in check) was another draw for Restoration audiences as, together, Rosalind and Celia provided an entertaining female and, therefore, innovative double-act. 

Victorian stage productions of As You Like It tended to emphasise the lighter aspects of the play by either cutting the more sinister moments or making light of them. The play was often rewritten or restructured to facilitate spectacular stagings to delight the eyes (sometimes complete with rabbits jumping about the stage in the Forest of Arden scenes) and the songs were transformed into - often much longer - musical interludes to delight the ear. When in the play Rosalind dresses as a boy, it is to disguise and protect herself on the journey to the forest; but the majority of Victorian theatre makers saw this moment as an opportunity to present Shakespeare's heroine as a thigh-slapping pantomime principal boy. Again, light-heartedness and frivolity were favoured over the potentially more challenging ideas that Shakespeare presents. 

Moving into the twentieth century, the play takes on multiple interpretations in the theatre. Most productions have understood the play politically in one way or another, maybe to explore ideas in the play that Shakespeare himself was not permitted to explore in the late Elizabethan period (if, indeed, the play was performed then). Directors, designers and actors have collaborated to present the play as a celebration of freedom of speech in the forest, in contrast to the oppression of Duke Frederick's dictatorship (this take on the play was particularly popular in Eastern Europe in the middle and latter half of the century); the play has also been staged to make ecological and environmental statements by emphasising the tough experiences of Corin the shepherd (who lives in the forest) in contrast to the affectations of courtly life (personified by the witty yet snobbish fool Touchstone, who pokes cruel fun at Corin for his rural ways). 

Particularly in the second half of the century, productions have focused on the issues of gender and homoeroticism raised by Rosalind's disguise. She is a woman playing a boy, who pretends to be Rosalind to help cure the lovesick Orlando (and, moreover, to test his love for her). Orlando's willingness to pretend that the young man he's just met is Rosalind raises the question of whether Orlando is falling in love with Rosalind or her male alter-ego, Ganymede (who, incidentally, in Roman mythology, was the young male lover of Jupiter, King of the Gods). 

The theatrical history of As You Like It runs for about 400 years, while its screen history covers only about 100 years. The first screen adaptations are now lost, but we know that there were four silent films based on the play made between 1908 and 1915. That's four versions in seven years; a very popular play. All four films from the early Edwardian period were short and either focused on a short sequence from the play or tried to compress the plot. They were all based on stage productions and could be viewed as documentations of those productions, not dissimilar to the screening we will see shortly; the main differences, however, are that our screening will have sound, we will see the whole play and we'll also see the audience members, whose presence and reactions heighten the theatrical occasion. 

As You Like It first appeared on screen as a film - as opposed to a filmed stage production - in 1936, when the director Paul Czinner offered his fairytale vision of the play. Elisabeth Bergner (Czinner's wife) plays Rosalind as a cheerful pantomime principal boy, very much in the style of the Victorian theatre. There is an over-riding sense of jollity in the film and no real sense of menace in the court, in which Rosalind and Celia (Sophie Stewart) both appear as giggling storybook princesses. As the film was made between two world wars, it kind of makes sense that the darker elements of Shakespeare's play are glossed over and audiences are invited to escape to a land of fantasy, created in part by none other than J M Barrie - father of Peter Pan’s Never Land - who prepared the screenplay. The film is significant to cinematic history, though, as it is the first British 'talkie' based on a Shakespeare play and it features a young Laurence Olivier as Orlando in his first Shakespearean role on screen (he would later direct and star in film adaptations of Henry V, Hamlet and Richard III). 

Just over fifty years later, Christine Edzard directed the second cinematic adaptation of As You Like It in 1992. She presents the court as a business empire run by yuppies, while Arden is no longer a leafy retreat but an urban wasteland, a concrete jungle on whose walls Orlando spray-paints his love poems dedicated to Rosalind (instead of attaching them on - and carving them into - trees, as Shakespeare specifies). The film didn't do very well at the box office and not many critics liked it either, but it is an interesting take on the play for its casting decisions and how they reflect on the two settings of court and Arden. The same actor (Don Henderson) plays both Duke Frederick and his usurped brother, while Andrew Tiernan plays both brothers Oliver and Orlando. This mirroring of roles through the casting gives the impression that Arden is a slightly distorted reflection of the court, that it is impossible to escape from yourself no matter what you’re trying to escape from or where you’re trying to escape to, but you can visit Arden to refresh and reawaken before returning home. 

The fourth and most recent film based on As You Like It is Kenneth Branagh's 2006 interpretation, which relocates the play to nineteenth-century Japan. The first half hour or so of the film is dark, broody and violent. Interior shots show confined, claustrophobic spaces that evoke oppressiveness. Brian Blessed plays the two dukes as shoguns, while the fight between Orlando (David Oyelowo) and Charles (Nobuyuki Takano) is a sumo-wrestling match. Orlando and Oliver (Adrian Lester) fight using a form of martial art in the pouring rain against a dark, menacing sky with blue lighting seemingly from the moon. When the setting moves to Arden, there is a refreshing amount of light and we are in bright, open spaces; the world of nature is set up as the perfect antidote to the stifling court. We have light after darkness, calmness after violence. The beautiful Japanese countryside provides the context for a free and unrestrictive Arden (incidentally, shot in south England). 

So, that's a potted history of the stage and screen adventures of As You Like It. In a moment, we’re going to watch something that brings those two histories together and, by doing so, makes history for this play.  But just before that, I’d like to end with what I think is the most amazing thing about As You Like It. Shakespeare presents us with so many different types of love - courtly love (Orlando for Rosalind), love-at-first-sight (Oliver for Celia), familial love (Celia for Rosalind), unrequited love (Silvius the shepherd for Phebe the shepherdess), self-love (Jaques the moody philosopher), selfless love (Adam the old servant for Orlando), homoerotic love (Orlando for Rosalind-as-Ganymede), sexual love and/or lust (Touchstone for Audrey the goat herd) - and he doesn't once show preference to any one kind of love. When compared to the didactic poem of Thomas Lodge called Rosalynde (published 1590) - from which Shakespeare drew inspiration for As You Like It and in which we're taught how to behave like proper courtly lovers - Shakespeare allows us to free-style our thoughts and feelings when we're with Rosalind in Arden, after having experienced with her the terrifying court in which tyranny rules and freedom of speech is forbidden. 

In fact, Shakespeare goes even further and satirises Lodge’s rigid rules of straight-laced courtly love by making Orlando write terrible love poetry (the awful rhymes of which are mocked mercilessly by that master of words, the court fool Touchstone) and having Rosalind dressed as a boy while Orlando tries to woo her. Shakespeare is inviting us to take from the play what we like, to connect with what we like and to enjoy what we like, without fear of breaking rules. His generosity is liberating and inspirational. He's saying, "Take As You Like It as YOU like it." 

© Ben Spiller, 11 November 2010.