Three years ago the director Lucy Pitman-Wallace announced herself as a hot young talent with a glitteringly malevolent Duchess of Malfi at the New Vic Theatre. She now returns with a life-enhancing As You Like It of felicitous rustic simplicity.
You enter the auditorium to find the cast ankle deep in apples, cheerily filling baskets like Breughel peasants on a scrumping spree. The harvest festival feel of Jess Curtis's design provides a mellow reminder of the play's linguistic fruitfulness: a place where the workaday world is described as 'full of briars', the trees to which Orlando pins his lovesick doggerel are said to bear rotten fruit, and the Autumnally-minded Jacques offers the chill observation that 'from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, and so from hour to hour we rot and rot.'
Pitman-Wallace works with telling economy of gesture, requiring no more than the scattering of a few leaves to indicate that we have left the puritanical darkness of the court and escaped into Arden. These opposing worlds are intensified through some significant doubling of roles - John Ashton plays both Dukes as a grim usurper and his emotionally liberated alter-ego. And the compellingly mordant Trevor Sellers suggests that the ennui-laden Jacques and the prissy courtier Le Beau are two, disenchanted sides of the same bad penny.
There's the occasional false move - the peasant scenes are thin enough without some distractingly self indulgent business involving cute puppet sheep. And the punk rock stag-hunting sequence is bizarrely misplaced, despite being presented as Celia's surreal nightmare.
In a play full of fruity imagery, Celia's role often seems no more than that of a gooseberry, yet Michelle Terry's free and easy interplay with Juliette Goodman's assured Rosalind is one of the chief delights of the evening. 'I like this place and would willingly waste some time in it' she declares. You may very well wish to join her.
· Until September 24. Box office: 01782 717962.
