As You Like It - Shakespeare revisits Lismore Castle

Last Monday night saw the long awaited production of Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It in Lismore Castle Courtyard. It was presented by Off The Ground Theatre who come over from the Wirral in the UK every summer and put on a terrific outdoor show in a number of "Big House" venues around Ireland. I wrote about their last play a year ago in this blogpost (Much Ado About Nothing) and I have been to nearly every show for the past 10 or so years, since A Legend of King Arthur.

This year they didn't disappoint, even thought the weather forecast was for rain on Monday, despite Sunday being the hottest day of summer. We had wonderful hot sunshine ensuring we stayed in the garden all day and had a barbecue to round it off a perfect day. We have been very lucky this summer with a good June and even though July was the wettest on record it didn't feel like that because it was warm and a lot of the rain seemed to fall at night. I can live with that sort of rain allocation, and it keeps the farmers happy too - seems this year we'll have a decent spud (potato) crop unlike last year when the ground was so sodden the harvesters and tractors couldn't avoid sinking to their axles in the mud. We know we'll have a bumper crop of apples as the windfalls are already making their way to Apple Jelly and the first few Apple and Blackberry Tarts have been made - even though the Bramleys are still quite tart they make a perfect tart with a little extra sugar. This is a big change from last year when we had a total of 6 apples from our 3 trees.



How I digress - Shakespeare would be proud of me! I go off on as many tangents as the Bard himself, without the poetry or lyricism. I have learnt so much about Shakespeare from Off The Ground productions as they present the plays in a totally anarchic, quirky and fun manner while staying true to the script and the plot, all the while interjecting song and dance routines from the present or recent past - this year being no exception and I will post some of the video clips here. What I love is the way the songs - usually about unrequited love as so many of these comedies are - are relevant to the play and segue perfectly from the script to the song and back again.




There was a wonderfully moving soliloquy which moved me to tears as it was one of those that my mother recited frequently when I was a child - All the World's a Stage - which I used to know as The Seven Ages of Man. She had a great love of Shakespeare and could recite many of the soliloquies word-perfectly along with lots of other poetry. So as I didn't realise this soliloquy was from this play it came as a bolt from the blue - and I surprised myself by remembering most of the lines as it was being played out. I'm here having a debate with youngest son about the semantics of Monologue vs. Soliloquy and I'm not sure which category this fits, but have decided the melancholy Jaques could have been talking to the other characters or just being reflective.



This year the anachronisms were many and varied - while last year's play was set in the 1930s of tea dances and floral frocks and dandy youths, this year's was a miscellany of ages - from the original Elizabethan doublet and hose and maximum cleavage to - punk rockers in the Forest of Arden! The banished Duke Ferdinand who lives there with his Robin Hood-like band of brothers is festooned in chains and black leather, and there are some wonderful cockscomb hairstyles among his buddies.



The love interests are many and convoluted and you'd need a map to track them all - but as I see the pattern emerging in Shakespeare's comedies there were few surprises - banished brothers, nefarious villains, and cross-dressing youths and comely maidens abound. This play had less cross-dressing than Twelfth Night which was on a few years ago, but as characters go, fair Rosalind made a very convincing Ganymede.

Orlando, the impoverished dispossessed heir to a fortune, loves Rosalind, the soon-to-be-banished daughter of exiled Duke Ferdinand whose evil brother Frederick distrusts her as much as her father; Touchstone the clown loves Audry the goat-herd (should that be goat-herdess?); Silvius the shepherd loves Phoebe the shepherdess - whose accent is pure Chav, and who, to complicate matters, has fallen in love with Ganymede, while Oliver, the evil fortune-hunting brother of Orlando loves Aliena who is actually Frederick's daughter Celia in disguise as she accompanies Rosalind/Ganymede in exile.

Now that was easy to follow, wasn't it? Yes, I felt the very same whirlwind of confusion and thank goodness for the programme notes or I'd be totally lost. As the actors from the company have remained largely unchanged over the years, there's a tendency to typecast them and certainly the lead characters reprise similar characters in the different plays - the buffoon clown and the burly philosopher and the droll wit and the buxom lass and the winsome waif - they're all there and the skill and talent is exceptional.

The key to enjoyment is comfort so it's imperative to come prepared for all weathers - there was an eclectic assortment of fashion and accessories among the audience, with the seasoned veterans bringing sleeping bags to snuggle into as night fell, picnic rugs for the kids sitting on the ground, and lots of scarves, shawls and waterproof ponchos - umbrellas not being very audience-friendly. I had about 4 layers of clothing on under a shawl I got in India 30 years ago, and one of my knitted cotton caps, and as the rain was but a drizzle in the first half, I was quite cosy. I went for a stroll in the upper gardens of the Castle at the interval as it was still quite bright, and I was keen to see the summer gardens as it was April since I'd been there, at the launch of the Castle Arts Summer exhibition.

Here are a few videoclips from the play, and some still shots - you get the idea of the ambience from these - and I will add more when I upload them to YouTube - a tiresomely slow process but worth it to build a nice video library of personal clips over the years - if you like to see them then just check out LismoreLady on YouTube - they're all there!