As you Like It: Shakespeare's Globe, London

An adolescent of a play – its drama bursting and lacking in unexpected places – it is arguably Shakespeare’s most awkward comedy, and one that rarely comes off in performance. Compared to the polished and perfected humour of older sisters Love’s Labours or Much Ado, As You Like It can appear both gawky and uncertain, caught between its freewheeling virtuoso comedy and serious themes of filial loyalty and parental responsibility.

In Sharrock’s hands the play is consciously liberated from its weightier agenda (as well as several scenes and characters), and becomes a sunny comedy of manners that relishes the wholesome naughtiness of its cross-dressing premise, while simultaneously bringing wide-eyed sincerity to its central love story.

The unique performing space of the Globe is exploited to the full, with the stage’s marble pillars reinvented as the trees of the Forest of Arden. Characters emerge and spill into the courtyard crowd, and Orlando’s verses are quite literally scattered to the winds, and tumble petal-like from the sky of the upper tiers.

Naomi Frederick makes a delightfully old-fashioned Rosalind. Her clipped English tones and leggy boyishness give one the sense of a 1950’s head girl, yielding an innocent authority that works well as a foil to Laura Rogers girlishly exuberant – occasionally over-exuberant – Miranda Richardson-esque Celia.

It is Tim McMullan’s drawlingly languid (and possibly alcoholic) Jacques who comes close to stealing the show however. Playing for laughs, he somehow imbues the simplest of lines with such purring innuendo that this typically ambiguous character takes on fixed and strangely moving form. Also notable is Dominic Rowan as Touchstone – a contradiction in terms as a genuinely funny Shakespearean jester.

With summer now here at last, the Globe beckons you to spend an evening in its enchanted Forest of Arden.

Alexandra Coghlan