BRANAGH’S AS YOU LIKE IT. Branagh’s master stroke—I submit—is to set the play at a time and in a place where the action doesn’t fit. He sets it in the English colony in nineteenth century Japan. Nick got to see only a couple minutes before going out and said, “There’s going to have to be some ninjas.†And a couple minutes later there were ninjas. The effect of the setting was to disorient me as a viewer, and helped me accept that Arden was imaginary and surprising even though the landscape looked solid and familiar.
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I feel like this and the previous post represent my personality rather well. The odds of me talking about Fitzgerald, or inserting ninjas into Shakespeare are probably equivalent.
…Okay, well..Ninjas are more likely.
I have never enjoyed a production of As You Like It before, and I LOVE Shakespeare. This one had problems, to be sure, but, basically, it had magic–which is what you need to pull off the strange strange stories it tells.