Touchstone must rank as one of Shakespeare’s least rib-tickling clowns. But he makes a valid point when he states that “a walled town is more worthier than a village”, particularly in Chester – whose open-air theatre stands just beyond the boundary of the city wall.
It’s a ready-made setting for the arboreal displacement of As You Like It – so much so that this is the second time the play has been staged here since the Grosvenor Park company was set up seven years ago. And though the cast assembles to declare “all the world’s a stage” as a prologue, it doesn’t signal a radical textual overhaul so much as a declaration of business as usual.
Within the ensemble, it’s frequently the fringe roles that catch the eye: Anton Cross’s mincing Le Beau, Hatty Preston’s bawdy Audrey, Katherine Toy’s female vicar who plays the wedding march on a Stylophone.
Not all of director Philip Wilson’s innovations are quite as successful: Ben Tolley’s Touchstone is issued with a puppet doppelganger, which simply makes him twice as unfunny. But there are two compelling central performances from Charlotte Miranda-Smith as a hot-and-bothered Celia; and Rose O’Loughlin’s Rosalind, who elicits as loud a laugh as I’ve heard for the line: “Do you not know I am a woman? When I think I must speak.”
Hymen’s masque is, for once, truly magical – though it is getting pretty chilly by this point. But nowhere offers a better illustration than Chester’s open-air theatre that sweet are the uses of adversity.
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In repertoire at Grosvenor Park, Chester, until 21 August. Box office: 0845 241 7868.
