Big Night Out: the day after

So, how was the show? As You Like It? The short reply is, great! Nay, more than that, I liked it very much; it was, brothers and sisters, double-plus wonderful.

Arriving at the venue knowing next to nothing except this was a Shakespeare comedy, once the house lights went down and the stage lights went up we were treated to a marvellous comic tale. One that was mostly about courtship and love and featuring lords, ladies, usurpers, sons, daughters, country fellows and wenches, a motley fool, drunken vicar, wrestler, shepherd and shepherdess.

Naturally, one of the ladies soon pretends to be a gentleman, which leads to all sorts of misunderstandings and hilarity. One can only hazard what the often-rowdy, mixed audiences of late-Elizabethan London further made of such comic twists when at that epoch all the actors were male. At that time, it would have been a gentleman pretending to be a lady who is pretending to be gentleman. Cool, eh? Gadzooks!

The show was lots of fun, had a superb cast, and great production. Listening to BBC Worldservice on the way home, it was clear that going to see As You Like It had been a much better choice than going to a bar to watch the predictable dismal performance of the over-hyped, over-rated England soccer team. Thanks, Mike W!