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by William Shakespeare, directed by Chris Abraham

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 26-October 24, 2025

Duchess: “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam”

Even one of the finest directors in Canada can turn out a misfire. So it is with the Stratford Festival’s latest As You Like It directed by Chris Abraham. AYLI may be one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays but it is also one of his most difficult since it is virtually plotless. It therefore requires a very firm hand, and here Abraham, contrary to every other play he has directed, has allowed his grip to relax. The result is a play with so little momentum it feels much longer than its 2½-hour running time.

With his frequent designer Julie Fox, Abraham has set the play in an unknown country at some time in the present. For the initial scenes depicting the oppressive atmosphere of the usurping Duke Frederick’s court, Fox has placed us in a storage facility guarded by men in camouflage with rifles and machine guns. Since one of the men loading bags of grain steals one, we can assume that famine in rife in the land. It is winter and snowing.

In whatever country Duke Frederick rules, women who are not soldiers wear headscarves, a rather unfair shorthand for a country that oppresses women. (After all, some women in countries with religious freedom wear headscarves as a sign of their faith.) After usurping the crown, Duke Frederick has banished Duke Senior (here recast as the "Duchess”), who seeks shelter in the Forest of Arden. Normally, designers present the Forest of Arden as a major visual contrast to the court, but in this production the Forest is as dimly lit by lighting designer Imogen Wilson. It is snowing there, too, and patrolled by soldiers in camouflage. The Forest of Arden is usually portrayed as a safe place where the exiled court feels so free of danger that they can focus on love instead of fear. In the current production soldiers guarding the exiles’ camp threaten whoever enters with raised rifles, thus voiding the symbolism of forest as a safe place.

Abraham and his designers are following Shakespeare’s text in which Duke Senior says, “Here feel we not the penalty of Adam, / The seasons’ difference, as the icy fang / And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind, / Which when it bites and blows upon my body / Even till I shrink with cold”. Abraham wants us to notice that the difference is not the change in seasons but the attitude of the two rulers to the seasons – Duke Frederick’s stockpiling food away from his people, the Duchess sharing whatever food can be found with all her court.

The problem is that Abraham and his designers have winter right up to Shakespeare’s Act 3, Scene 2, line 10 when Orlando posts his first poem on a tree. After intermission, we start with Act 3, Scene 2, line 11 and it is suddenly spring. It would be more difficult but also more effective if Abraham and his team could make spring arrive gradually, beginning, say, after Amiens’ song (here shared with Jacques), “Under the greenwood tree”. That, the first love song in the play, would help signal that both love and spring are simultaneously warming up the cold world of the play. As it is, we feel that the world of the play, which in Shakespeare usually reflects the state of human nature, seems indifferent to the arrival of so many good-natured people.

A worse difficulty, and one I have never previously noted in a play directed by Abraham, is the leaden pace of the action. There is a deliberateness to the dialogue that makes it sound unnatural and too long a pause from scene to scene to make us feel impelled forward through the story, much less give us the madcap feeling of comedy. In the most exquisite scene of the play, the quartet of Act 5, Scene 2 with Rosalind’s refrain of “ And I for no woman”, the timing is off and with it the tone of melancholy humour.

The cast is very uneven particularly in voice production. Some know how to project and speak clearly enough to convey the text’s meaning, some shout rather than project and thus obscure its meaning and some alternate between the two. One of the worst offenders, sad to say, is Christopher Allen as the male lead Orlando. Allen shouts his anger at his oldest brother Oliver and shouts his love after seeing Rosalind with the result that there is no difference in his mode of expression of his two principal emotions. Allen does cease shouting in Orlando’s scenes of wooing the disguised Rosalind. He thereby conveys his character’s thoughts more subtly, making us wonder why he felt he had to indulge in shouting at all. In a side note, Orlando’s wrestling match with Charles (Joe Perry), staged by Anita Nittoly, is the most awkward, least convincing ASYI wrestling match I’ve ever seen.

As Rosalind, Sara Farb also indulges in shouting through most of Act 1. She begins to project more frequently in Act 2 and is thus more able to mine the comedy more fully of Rosalind’s predicament in allowing Orlando to “woo” her while Rosalind is disguised as a boy.

Unfortunately, the parallel couple of Rosalind’s best friend Celia and Orlando’s oldest brother Oliver does not have the impact it should because both Makambe K. Simamba and Andrew Chown are given to shouting so often that few of their words can be understood.

Luckily, there is a cadre of actors who are expert at projecting voices and conveying meaning. Chief of these are Sean Arbuckle as the usurping Duke Frederick and Seana McKenna as the banished Duchess Senior (listed simply as “The Duchess”). Arbuckle’s expressions of suppressed rage are more frightening than any threat of gunfire, and McKenna’s expressions of contentment suggest that a woman too long at court is newly revelling in the strength and beauty of nature.

As the courtier Le Beau, Jeff Lillico, despite being given the silly mannerism of frequent bowing, conveys more information more clearly and with more sense of an eccentric personality than do his interlocutors. As the shepherd Corin, Hiro Kanagawa is a welcome presence since his calm mode of speaking expresses more of import than do performers in larger roles around him. Especially praiseworthy is the Silvius of Michael Man. In most productions of AYLI, Silvius come off as a minor comic figure. Man so well conveyed the shepherd’s unrequited passion for the shepherdess Phoeba in an 11-line speech in Act 2, Scene 4, that he received a round of applause. At the very end of the play, Man’s Silvius, so filled with love and fear of rejection, becomes the one of the eight lovers who draws the most sympathy. Man’s performance is a masterclass in how complex emotions well communicated can give a minor character major impact.

In contrast to Man’s Silvius, Steve Ross as the clown Touchstone and Aaron Krohn as the renowned melancholiac Jaques give performances that are hard to fathom. Given that the action is set in the present when aristocrats do not have fools to cheer them up, Touchstone’s accompanying Rosalind and Celia makesno sense. We don’t know if he is their friend, a hanger-on or just someone who doesn’t like the new Duke. Ross and Abraham don’t seem to know either so that Ross has Touchstone loaf about, pursue the lewd Audrey and say odd things without any sense of purpose. Ross’s best moment comes when Abraham allows him to improvise and directly address the audience at the start of Act 2, something that could have been done with Touchstone’s speeches throughout the play to make the character an intermediary between the play and the audience.

In relation to the exiled court surrounding the Duchess, Jaques similarly appears to have no function and Krohn certainly does not give him one. Krohn delivers Jaques’s famous Seven Ages of Man speech so off-handedly that it commands almost no attention. Krohn invests Jaques with so little personality that we’re surprised that anyone cares if he departs. And then, in this production, Jaques not does depart because someone hands him a guitar, and, as one of the main singers he leads the play’s final song.

I must mention that even though Amiens’s first song is shared with Jaques, all the other songs, set to music by Ron Sexsmith, are sung by Gabriel Antonacci whose smooth, sweet voice brings out the mixture of innocence, wisdom and nostalgia that should inform the entire play.

As You Like It has not fared so well at the Stratford Festival this century. Overly heavy concepts have crushed the play’s delicacy in 2005, 2010 and 2016. This year rather the opposite occurs with too little attention to detail and structure. It’s a strange thing to say but Daryl Cloran’s Shakespeare-meets-the-Beatles mashup of the play seen at the Grand Theatre in London last year captured more of the play’s spirit and energy than does the present production with an unadulterated text.

Christopher Hoile

Photos: Sara Farb as Rosalind and Christopher Allen as Orlando; Seana McKenna (centre) as the Duchess with members of the company; Sara Farb (centre) as Rosalind with members of the company. © 2025 David Hou.

For tickets visit: www.stratfordfestival.ca.