Botanic
Gardens, Glasgow
Four
stars
It's a
big night at Oliver's nightclub at the start of Bard in the Botanics' updated
look at Shakespeare's gender-bending rom-com. Oliver's swanky establishment is
the place to be, even if all intimacies and asides are shared in the smoking area
or the bathroom just like any club.
Alan
Steele's Duke Frederick may be a shiny suited spiv, drunk on his own
illegitimate power, but his daughter Celia and her cousin Rosalind are all glitzed
up and ready for action. This they duly get by way of a wrestling match
involving Oliver's kid brother Orlando. It's hardly WWE, but the chemistry
between Orlando and Rosalind is similarly athletic in its intentions.
With
Rosalind thrown out of town by Frederick, she, Celia and best pal Touchstone
decide to get their heads together in the country. The Arden they arrive in
like a trio of Glastonbury virgins is a flower- adorned hippy village seemingly
occupied by a set of free-loving Travellers who have come together to form a
tribe like the ghosts of free festivals past. In fact, they are under the benevolent
and laid-back care of Rosalind's exiled old man Duke Senior.
With
Rosalind disguised as a plaid-shirted and woolly-hatted hipster, the fresh air
gets the hormones pumping, as Robert Elkin's Touchstone gets it on with Simon
Lembcke's himbo farmer, Andrey, Kirsty Macduff's nature loving Celia falls for
Oliver, and other merry dances ensue before Stephanie McGregor's Rosalind comes
clean to Charlie Clee's Orlando. Only Nicole Cooper's Jaques, here a
dreadlocked non-conformist wise woman more cynical than melancholy, stays
outside it all.
Gordon
Barr's production conjures up the two worlds on Carys Hobbs' wood-lined VIP
area set with loquacious ease, as everyone involved becomes giddy with love.
McGregor and McDuff make a fine double act, wrapping the men-folk around their
fingers with intelligence and guile. This all makes for the prettiest of
pictures that illustrates the cross-gender casting without ever making a song
and dance of things. When the assorted lovers do take a spin around the garden,
it’s clear the flowers of romance are in full bloom.
The Herald, July 3rd 2019
ends
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