As You Like It

What a great idea to shoot this play on location and mostly outdoors. The green meadows and leafy forests fill the production with the breath of life, and a remarkable natural feel. Not only does the outdoor filming suit the pastoral setting and themes of this play. By staging everything on location, and in an unsophisticated way, it makes us all the more attuned to how a script and a company of actors can transform a familiar, real-life location into something else. A fictional scenario suddenly becomes real before our eyes. Seeing this production, it's a reminder that your neighborhood park could easily serve as the stage for drama and high-flown rhetoric.

Who cares about the technical difficulties? When Rosalind has to brush aside a fly unwelcomed by the production, it's all the more charming, the way it increases the realism and spontaneity.

All this comes through even more because this is a largely straightforward recording of a play, not an earnest work of cinema. I'm all for fluid and creative camera work, but here the mostly static camera is the better choice, making us feel more that we are attending a live play outdoors, not a movie that's clearly removed from our reality.

This is exciting...and frankly, As You Like It needs all the excitement that can be supplied. I'm not exactly a Shakespeare connoisseur, but it seems to me that this play is one of the fluffier, flimsier plays of his I've seen.

For such a long production, very little happens. It's light in tone but lacks the comedy, scheming, and twists of other plots like A Midsummer Night's Dream. For any of the interesting stuff in this play (some well-written dialogue, a few gestures towards action or suspense, gender-bending, even pseudo-lesbianism way ahead of its time), you can probably find some other Shakespeare play that does it better. Even by the standards of the time, it breaks credibility that Rosalind's lover and her own father can't see through her boy-disguise and recognize her. The play feels like either a test run written early in the Bard's career or a rehash from the end. I would've had a much harder time watching this production if filmed indoors on sets, even artistic or otherwise well-made ones.

On the other hand, this play stands out because it has wrestling. Wrestling?! In Shakespeare?! I guess so! And not that amateur wrestling like students do for school -- think pro wrestling, but not fake! (It's all the funnier to see lowbrow pro wrestling in highbrow theatre like Shakespeare.) This TV movie treats us to a fully-staged match starring Darth Vader. And I don't mean James Earl Jones, a noted actor for whom a Shakespeare performance would be nothing unexpected. No, we get the man in the black suit himself, David Prowse, whose role even requires him to speak many lines! Yes, Darth Vader does Shakespeare!

Prowse holds his own in both the fighting and reciting, although you can tell he's not the talented professional that the other actors are. Speaking of whom, they are the other chief strong point for this movie. (Oddly, though, they didn't reshoot a few scenes in which Helen Mirren stumbles on her lines.)

Also notable for Le Beau, the twittiest character ever; a Dana Carvey lookalike playing leading man Orlando; and the leading ladies decked out in court dresses with headpieces you have to see to believe, like something taken from a sci-fi picture or maybe Hammer House of Horrors.

Shakespeare's As You Like It (1978 TV Movie) was directed by Basil Coleman. Helen Mirren stars as Rosalind, the biggest female role in any Shakespeare play.

This movie is part of the Ambrose Shakespeare series, which filmed every one of Shakespeare's plays. Typically, movies in this series had minimal production values. (This is the way Shakespeare's plays were seen when they were originally produced. However, now the lack of scenery looks skimpy.)

However, this movie was filmed in Glamis Castle (as in Macbeth). The location allows us to see a real castle, with ramparts, as well as a great wooded area, which becomes Arden Forest.

We all know that Mirren can act, but I think she got better as she grew older. One problem is that she's very feminine--as Viola is--but she spends most of the play dressed as a man.

This As You Like it is probably as good as you're going to get on the small screen. I don't think it matters whether you see it as DVD or in a movie theater. My advice is to try to see it live onstage.

Helen Mirren heads a splendid cast of actors in this production. Not only is the cinematography lovely, but the forest scenes accurately depict both the sense of freedom and the sense of dislocation and strangeness that a retreat to the Forest of Arden represents for the court characters. Rosalind serves as a splendid counterpoint to Orlando in the forest, training him to understand the needs of women and constantly catching him off-guard with her banter. Jacques is suitably pompous and condescending, admirably outwitted by Rosalind when he has the audacity to attempt to match wits with her. Even the minor parts, such as those of Phebe and Audrey, are acted with skill.

Some of these BBC Television Shakespeare adaptations are a bit dry and dusty. But this one was really dynamic and engaging. Helen Mirren is the perfect and most beautiful Rosalind, the best I have seen. I love the songs they composed for the Shakespearean lyrics. There aren't many AYLI versions available to watch on screen so this is a must watch. Along with the 2010 Globe version which is available online.

This is where it all began. BBC producer Cedric Messina was shooting a drama at Glamis Castle when he thought, "What a great place to shoot 'As You Like It.'" And so the idea for the complete series of Shakespeare telecasts was born.

Unfortunately, an all-too-real Forest of Arden here provides an impediment to the play. An artificial meditation on identity and appearance, "As You Like It" has one of Shakespeare's lamest plots, with poor characterizations, perfunctory incidents and sloppy story resolution. "Love's Labour's Lost" and "Twelfth Night" are as solid as tanks by comparison.

Video equipment was not as portable in the late 1970s as it is now, and the whole exercise is sapped by the actors' battle against Nature and logistics. A sense of strain is omnipresent. The characters are often physically too far apart and must yell at each other, Helen Mirren has to wave gnats away from her face repeatedly during a major speech, and a lush carpeting of ferns belies text references to a harsh outdoor existence. Basically, you come out of this play humming the trees.

Performances across the board are OK, but never better than that. Helen Mirren shows reliable professionalism as Rosalind and Richard Pasco's bilious affect is uniquely suitable to the character of Jacques.

Also noteworthy is the Banished Duke of Tony Church, who recorded frequently for the now-forgotten Marlowe Society of Cambridge's complete Shakespeare series on Argo LPs. And 6'7" David Prowse, fresh off his first appearance as Darth Vader in the original "Star Wars," shows up unexpectedly as Charles the Wrestler, performing the Shakespeare well in his own voice, and not overdubbed by James Earl Jones.

Budget considerations meant that "As You Like It" and "Henry VIII" would be the only plays in this series shot on location. BBC studio drama would come to an end in the early 1990's, but a production like this one points up the advantages of staying indoors.