As You Like It – in Newcastle
Subsidiary delights of going to Newcastle are the excellent Roots Music, which always has a good selection of jazz and a suberb section of British folk albums, and the ever-expanding Eldon centre which gets less attractive and more confusing and less like anywhere I want to be every time I make the mistake of going into it. Stick to Grainger Market, JG!
But the Royal Shakespeare Co doing As You Like it was excellent. Very bare staging, compared to the sumptuous Kaffe Fasset set of a previous production, but it very much suited the hard, black-clad court of Duke Frederick, the usurper, and the wintry, few-leaved Forest of Arden. I found myself thinking that the main players were all extremely competent but none stood out. On the other hand, Jacques, played as Billy Connelly by Forbes Masson, Touchstone (Richard Katz) and Corin (Geoffrey Freshwater) brought real meaning to the parts, Corin’s honest working man well emphasised, Touchstone really mad, and Jacques a melancolic with a good line in satirical humour.( I don’t think it does to play Jacques too seriously). And the RSC always speaks the lines so clearly, they always have, so understanding is made easy.