As you like it, Lakespeare, Verity Lane Market (and various other locations until 6 Mar)

 

Lakespeare's been doing the free-shakespeare in the outdoors thing for a while now - seasons of "Much Ado About Nothing" in 2017, "Twelfth Night" in 2018 and "Midsummer's nights dream" in 2019 - and after COVID interruption, it's back for 2022 with a play just as entertaining, if not quite as familiar as the last three - with a team of local talent to tell a tale of banishment, romance, rivalries, comedy, melancholy and a big honking Act 5 deus ex machina to wrap everything up. Featuring one of Shakespeare's best known monologues, one of the most substantial female roles in the canon, plus wrestling, poetry and duels, it's got everything a good night out should have. This season a couple of the performances have moved indoors to the upstairs area at Verity Lane Market, which proves a fine venue for these sort of shenanigans (with many good eats downstairs to be brought upstairs to consume during the show).

In general, the production is done with absolute emphasis on simplicity and clarity - the set is nothing more than a round space in the middle of the audience, with a couple of chairs dragged in for assistance occasionally, and plenty of strategic exits for people to dash off when they need to. If the cast tend to project more than is strictly necessary for the indoor venue, that can be excused as a byproduct of a run dashing between indoors and outdoors on alternate nights. 

Natasha Vickery shines as the lovelorn Rosalind - if she's never entirely convincing in the girl-dressed-as-a-boy sections, that's more a feature than a bug as the rest of the cast mostly remain unconvinced too, despite her efforts. She's great at the love-at-first-sight moment between her and Jake Fryer-Hornsby's Orlando, and they sell their mutual affection and indulgence of one another's nonsense as the story develops. Shae Kelly is delightful as the hanger-on, Touchstone, very much along for the ride until he gets dragged into his own romantic love triangle between Anneke Van der Velde's goofy Audrey and Ryan Street's rough-as-guts William. Heidi Silberman plays the two different duchesses, good and evil, with authority and alternatively petty cruelty and generous embracement of those around her. Karen Vickery plays the moody Jaques as somewhat the worse for several rounds of booze, but also hyperverbal and argumentative to the last. Ylaria Rogers and Jake McMillan have one of the evening's other love plots, and while this is where Shakespeare's plotting gets massively arbitrary as to why these particular two should pair up, we do get the sense that they're together for more than just to provide a lot of matching pairs at the end. Similarly Lachlan Herring's lovelorn young Sivius feels very true to every young man who's ever felt a serious case of the unrequiteds, in this case with the fresh-faced Phoebe of Katerina Smalley. Max Gambale scores in three small roles as wrestler, familiarly-accented farmer and surprise love-rock-god-to-make-the-ending-happen, and Jay Cameron provides musical accompaniment that has the audience clapping along and stomping feet. 

In short, this is a fun, frivolous shakespearean night out, the perfect accompaniment to a pizza and wine, or a cider and a bao, or a pasta and a fizzydrink.