ABOUT PERFORMANCE
AS YOU LIKE IT (c. 1599-1600). It is largely a dramatization of Thomas Lodge's pastoral novel Rosalynde (1590). Changes in names, tone, and incident have been made, and six characters added notably Jaques and Touchstone. The facts that the play was entered in the Stationers' Register, on August 4, 1600, to prevent unauthorized publication and that there is no printed version before the First Folio of 1623 suggest that As You Like It was popular in its own day (and it has so continued). Tradition has it that Shakespeare acted the part of Adam.
The plot tells how Rosalind and Orlando, who fall in love at first sight when Orlando comes to wrestle at her uncle's court, are both driven from their homes – Orlando by a villainous elder brother, and Rosalind by her usurping uncle. Independently they seek shelter in the Forest of Arden, Orlando accompanied by Adam, his old retainer, and Rosalind by her cousin Celia and the jester Touchstone. The girls disguise themselves as brother and sister, with Rosalind posing as the youth Ganymede. Residing in the forest are Rosalind's exiled father and his men, among them the malcontent Jaques. Also present are some country folk. Various love affairs ensue. These take comical turns, primarily through Rosalind's male disguise. The play ends with a wedding of four couples and with reconciliation between the villains and their kin.
As the title implies, the play is a romantic comedy as you like it: the setting for four of its five acts is in an idyllic forest where lovely songs fill the air, where a handsome young man and a beautiful, witty young lady-deeply in love-are united, and where villains are reformed. Beneath this world of "good in everything," Shakespeare, through mingling for the first time elements from pastoral drama with those of comedy, explores further the nature of appearance and reality. The court, the civilized world, is cruel. But the beautiful country too has its villains, both human and natural. To comment on his themes, Shakespeare employs contrast, ranging from the coarse wooing of the country folk to the idealized love-making of the pastoral romance characters to the realistic romancing of Rosalind-Ganymede and Orlando. There is also direct commentary on the ways of man by Touchstone and Jaques, characters extraneous to the plot. The forest emerges as the environment in which honest responses engendered by love can grow within the individual. Yet civilization with its social institutions, such as the formal marriages with which the play ends, is also necessary for the total well-being of mankind. (taken from The Reader’s Encyclopedia of World Drama)
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REVIEWS
Love, Reality and Illusion
We're taken aback: from the world of money, power, politics and pragma, it's not easy to step into the green world of nature, liberation, love, Eros, English renaissance pastoral of with its conventions, legends, locations. It is also not easy to glean what it was that Slobodan Unkovski was searching for in Shakespeare's comedy As You Like It. It is only in exile, fleeing from the court, returning to nature, to forest of Arden, that the courtiers and shepherds find themselves, experience a kind of cleansing, transformation and transition from hatred flourishing at the court to love in all its many shades and hues, governing the Forest of Arden, a place of Utopia, dreams, fantasy, and poetry that neither Shakespeare nor Unkovski particularly and unreservedly trust. Nature opposed to society, court opposed to an Arcadia, liberating and pastoral opposed to what's rigid and set, love opposed to hate. (...) Love, enchantment, but also madness, folly. Ultimately, a game, all is but a game and playing, one should try to relax and not seek any particular meaning and significance in anything. Time flies!
Love and time are protagonists of this play. Love that elevates us and makes fools of us, that entrances and torments us, that tosses us in all directions, from enchantment to hatred and crime. A dangerous game, difficult to understand, as is time, the very heart of love and its vocabulary. Love, blind and clairvoyant, lost in the mythology of love, in all manner of exaggeration. As long as no one asks us, we feel we know what love is, what time is. Thence a large clock through which the characters enter the stage that Milorad Tabački shaped with few means, but very eloquently. (...) As You Like It is an imaginative, theatrical production, but at the same time a lucid and witty comment on love as theatre and theatricality and on all sorts of talk about love in which the matter at hand is often lost and buried.
If the world is stage and theatre, the theatre that Slobodan Unkovski nourishes, or at least often indulges in, calls for actors full of imagination and intelligence, as is the case with the cast of this production: Vojislav Brajović as Frederick, Marinko Madžgalj, Nebojša Glogovac, Nikola Vujović, Nikola Djuričko, Marko Bacovic, Boris Isakovic, Miodrag Radovanović, Nada Šargin, Sonja Kolačaric, Milena Predić.
Muharem Pervić, Politika, 23 November 2009
Sweet Bird of Youth
Slobodan Unkovski, master of 'theatrical illusions', once more sets the magic of theatre in motion to its very limits, entrusting it to his equals in this mastery. Nada Sargin as Rosalind and Ganymede, a girl who disguises as a boy in order to outsmart her uncle's wickedness and test her beloved Orlando, effectively separated women's sensibility from men's joviality. (...) Nada Sargin played this travesty in an extraordinary way, which could have been foreseen in her acting assignments so far. Having played little comedy, in which she is excellent and imaginative, Nada Šargin, after a series of tragic heroines, plays two characters, equally irresistible in their respective sexes. She 'read' Ganymede particularly well, playing a young man full of joy, of movement, vigorous in body and soul, whom traditional morality gave liberties that Rosalind could never have had.
Radovan Vujović as Orlando also rounds up several exceptional successes in his acting career. 'A Shakespeare actor' would, perhaps, be the greatest compliment a young actor could be paid. It is for this kind of people that the genius of Stratford probably wrote for – people who in their acting reconstruct the story, history and character, people who exude the good spirit of stage, beneficial for others as well. Vojislav Brajovic, playing two brothers who were arguing and who reconcile, The Duke and Frederick, didn't have a difficult task, bearing in mind this bard's ability for actor's transformation, travesty, quick stage reactions and rare charm.
Very much in the mood for comedy, Marinko Madžgalj achieved to make Amiens, Charles and Silvius characters that define a certain genre. This time Madžgalj put his many talents to the service of illusion that every human step teems with life and that it is impossible to suppress it, and a sin to destroy it. His antipode, Jaques, played by Nebojša Glogovac, his out of place melancholy, was a true mirror, in which this pair of actors reflected each other, outplaying each other (...)
The young costume designer Maja Mirković deserves a special mention for the costumes that add a final comment to a travesty which, had it not been so well designed, would have been much less understandable and not nearly as funny. Through her costumes, the young artist managed to tell a story without which both Shakespeare and Unkovski would be far less playful and with far less meaning, and actors would be denied one of the strongholds of their characters in this production.
Dragana Bošković, Danas, 29 November 2009
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