★★★☆☆
Three Stars
Oxford and Shakespeare have long experienced a faithful and devout relationship; the 17th Earl of Oxford plays host to one of the many alternative author theories of the bard, while the University itself honours the dramatist every Trinity with his very own finals paper. A fitting choice, then, to chart an adaptation of As You Like It in an Oxford pastoral environment, complete with floppy haircuts, vintage bikes and geek-chic glasses.
But director Rob Williams has done more than relocate to a familiar setting; he has changed the entire genre of the piece. No longer is As You Like It a comedy of the pastoral, but an intense romance of banishment and mistaken identity, set in the wilderness and with a backdrop of almost psychedelic, disturbing sounds. Rosalind’s moustache fails to generate titters, but her disguise adds a new kind of poignancy, a focus away from the farce and onto the intense rapport between the two young lovers. Playing the heroine, Ashleigh Wheeler is the notable performance of the short film, and it is a performance that holds the piece together; her plausibility of character is startling, her communication through Shakespeare’s language fully comprehensible, and her presence on camera commandeering. But it’s a shame that the screenplay cheated this performance, and indeed, the effectiveness of the video as a whole.
With condensing a play it’s understandable that sacrifices with regards to plot must be made, but the brevity of what is a rather tangled attempt to adhere to Shakespeare’s original results, quite simply, in confusion. As someone who has already seen a production of As You Like It, my efforts to follow the film, especially the initial scenes prior to Arden, were worrying. Jack Hackett would have benefitted much from expelling material to suit its shortened form, or to alter the dialogue somewhat in the initial scenes.
But despite the muddied screenplay, one can’t fail but to appreciate Williams’s vision of the piece. Unlike theatre, film allows for a concentration of moments usually overlooked in real life and Williams has played with this: drawing out fleeting images of an origami boat on the rippling water, of a swan stretching its wings, of a fragile moment shared between protagonists. The image of the tree of verse is particularly striking, and this combined with the intoxicating musicality is a work of art in itself. Sometimes the poetic artistry of the film appears too forced, such as in the superfluous flicking between camera angles, but on the whole, the play that produced the line, “all the world’s a stage” has captured moments in the world in a new light for new audiences to appreciate.
