As You Like It

"Much of the action takes place on an almost clinically bare stage, and the fear and violence in the usurping Duke's court, where everyone wears formal black Elizabethan dress, is chilling. With his lame eye and air of festering resentment, Sandy Neilson's Duke Frederick has a touch of the psychotic about him ... Boyd ... shows us the bloody reality of rural life as the shepherd Corin (excellent Geoffrey Freshwater) slowly skins and beheads a dead rabbit before the appalled gaze and gasps of an audience which seems to find this bunny butchery more horrible than the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear. A third 'dark' As You Like It was Sam Mendes' version in the second season of his Bridge Project (a classical repertory company), which in 2010 was paired with a production of The Tempest. The cast was American and British, and it was toured around the world - in Spain, the United States, New Zealand, and in Epidaurus and London's Old Vic. David Rooney wrote: 'Mendes establishes a mood of such pervasive gloom and ponderousness that, when it comes time for merry reversal and romance, his laborious staging of As You Like It can't quite shake off the pall"--