Shakespeare’s As You Like It by The Whole Pack Theatre Company @ Millbrook Village Hall, Sunday, 25 July 2026
Glorious weather permitted an outdoor performance of The Whole Pack Theatre Company’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which took place in the idyllic setting under an English oak in the garden of Millbrook Village Hall on Sunday.
Before the play began, the audience was subjected to announcements over a loudspeaker making clear in a sinister tone everything that is expressly forbidden at the dreary court of the usurping Duke Ferdinand; music, art and love are all outlawed.
This sadly all-too-familiar repressive regime is in marked contrast to that led by the banished Duke Senior in the ‘green-world’ of the forest where the rustic revelry of feasting, hunting, singing and companionship thrive.
Down in the Forest of Arden…
The adaptation foregrounded the lyrical, rather than clownish, aspects of the goings on in the Forest of Arden.
As the play’s director Jessamy James points out in the programme notes: “music and dance are the driving forces of this production”.
This was especially apt given that As You Like It is the bard’s most musical play, something that was underlined by playfully transposing to it the often-quoted lines from Twelfth Night: If music be the food of love,/Play on’.
The show opened with a traditional English folk song sung by Rosalind about Sovay, a female highwayman, making clear from the outset its feminist credentials.
Not only does this song convey Rosalind’s inherently transgressive nature, but it foreshadows her own disguise later in the play as the male Ganymede.
As well as songs from the original play, the musical director Mehgan Louise Taylor composed another song for Rosalind which foregrounds the central love theme in a sexually suggestive way that drew bawdy laughter from the audience, which Shakespeare would no doubt have approved.
The song ‘Oak, Ash, and Thorn’ incorporates two verses from a poem of that title by Rudyard Kipling, introducing a third verse which clarifies why two of the lords choose to remain in the forest, rather than returning to the Court at the play’s end.
‘We’re rooted here in the forest earth,/With sap our blood is thick’. The importance of human beings connecting to Nature was thereby strengthened, resonating with contemporary ecological concerns.
The singing voices of the international all-female cast produced wonderful harmonies and the elegant and joyful dance sequences, choreographed by the multi-talented Megan Carter, who also played Rosalind, ‘Ganymede’ and Amiens, as well as a harp, contributed to the sense that the Forest of Arden is a place where everyone is able to express themselves freely and in a spirit of convivial friendship.
Gender-crossing
The Company was established with the primary goal of affording actresses a wide range of often challenging gender-crossing roles, akin to those open to the all-male companies in Shakespeare’s own day, and this worked to hilarious effect in this production, which called for almost instant sex changes.
These were often achieved very effectively through tiny details, such as the pencilling in of a moustache (Rosalind/Ganymede), or a swift and seamless costume change.
Likewise, the social descent of Celia (Catriona Trainer) from duchess to country woman (Aliena) is conveyed in a way that a contemporary audience will recognise immediately: by the addition of a sticking plaster to her glasses!
One of the most famous speeches in the whole Shakespearean canon is delivered by the melancholy nobleman Jacques (Jessamy James), beginning: ‘All the world’s a stage ’, in which s/he proceeds to outline the seven stages of man in relentlessly bleak terms.
In this production, Jacques’ jaundiced view of the human condition is very much at odds with the more festive and life-affirming ending in which all sibling rivalries are happily resolved and misplaced affections unknot themselves to create a mood of unmitigated celebration.
As a result, audience members were able to gather up their folding chairs and picnic baskets and depart with a spring in their step.
The reviewer was gifted tickets to facilitate this review.
