'Extracts from Jan Kott's essay, Bitter Arcadia, figure prominently in the later pages of this programme. I hope it will not be assumed that I have tried to follow his precepts. All Kott's writing is refreshing and stimulating. He stalks Shakespeare from unexpected approaches and with unique equipment, and I have found much illumination in Bitter Arcadia. But this production is not designed to demonstrate specific ideas advanced in that essay.

Nor is it my purpose to reintroduce the convention of boys acting women. Richard Robinson, William Ostler, Nathaniel Field, Robert Goughe, Alexander Cooke, Edward Kynaston and Charles Hart were all said to be excellent in every detail, including high soprano voices. (It was even held that Elizabeth I was a female impersonator - the real Elizabeth having died at the age of eleven.) The degree of exactitude in the impersonations of these actors is arguable - though some of them were probably castrated - but virtuoso mimicry cannot be the aim of adult actors who are neither eunuchs nor androgynes. Prosody before pelvises.

Nevertheless, an all-male staging of As You Like It has to be rooted organically in a belief about the nature of the play if something more than the sheer excitement of a theatrical experiment is hoped for. I do not want to render Shakespeare and myself ridiculous by here attempting to reduce that belief to a few choice sentences. The production and the play will have to speak for themselves, and I hope the former will prove true to the latter. Suffice it to say that - in As You Like It - the mysteries of its disguises, the antiquities of its love-play, the exquisiteness of its images, the freedom of its action, conjure up a time of magical release from material dominion which is as much part of the dreaming of our own age as of myth and legend.

Our dreams, for all their special landscapes, are most pregnant because of the ease with which we identify and recognise their inhabitants. As we flee, as we embrace, as we wrestle - we know who the protagonists are. (Only on waking does all become obscure.) It is for this reason that this production utilises modern semblances.

The examination of the infinite beauty of Man in love - which lies at the very heart of As You Like It - takes place in an atmosphere of spiritual purity which transcends sensuality in the search for poetic sexuality. It is for this reason that I employ a male cast; so that we shall not - entranced by the surface reality - miss the interior truth.'

NB:
An edition of Shakespeare Our Contemporary by Jan Kott is still available published by W. W. Norton & Company
Order a copy from our Bookshop

Production photographs: Zoë Dominic