TORONTO -- There's a fine line that separates the comedic from the merely laughable, and in the world of Albert Schultz, that line is clearly an undefended border.
In fact, in his new staging of Shakespeare's As You Like It, currently playing at the Young Centre, Soulpepper's artistic director makes such an early incursion into laughable territory that he fails to find his way back onto the more hospitable turf of comedy in the two-and-a-half hour length of the show.
It all starts promisingly enough, in the confrontation between our hero Orlando (played by Michael Blake) and his conniving older brother Oliver (Mike Ross), a confrontation in which it quickly becomes obvious that Oliver is out to cheat his younger fraternal brother out of everything their late father intended that he have.
But things start to go more than a little awry when the action moves to the court of the Duke Frederick (Michael Hanrahan), another fraternal misanthrope, a grasping sort who has usurped the dukedom of his brother (Derek Boyes) and forced him into exile in the Forest of Arden.
Nonetheless, it is to the usurping Duke's court that Orlando repairs, where he is soon engaged in a bogus wrestling match that is certain to give you new appreciation for the subtlety that marks the work of the artists of the WWF.
His loutish opponent (Stephen Guy-McGrath) it must be noted, has a most un-Shakespearean drawl that wouldn't be out of place south of the Mason-Dixon Line, which is, in this production, the closest Schultz ever comes to elegant foreshadowing. For, once Orlando has fallen for the charms of the duke's niece, the lovely Rosalind (Sarah Wilson), he too repairs to the Forest of Arden, which seems to be a particularly squalid little piece of the Ozarks, as envisioned by designer Lorenzo Savoini -- a world where white-faced minstrels frolic amidst the blood red hills, singing faux blue-grass odes composed by actor Ross.
Once hidden in this hard-scrabble turf, Orlando takes up with a young man named Ganymede, who is really fair Rosalind in disguise, and while everyone around them dabbles in romance, the two fall head over heels in love.
At least, that's the way it should play out in this delightful precursor of today's romantic comedy. The problem, however, is that under Schultz's direction, there is precious little romance and even less comedy as a largely inexperienced cast stumbles through the text in what one can only hope will become the before shots for a future promotional video for the Soulpepper Academy.
But it's not merely the young and inexperienced actors who suffer under Schultz's direction for even seasoned pros like Diego Matamoros (cast as an oddly giddy melancholic Jaques) and the usually superb Oliver Dennis (as Touchstone) seem to be wound up tighter than tops, determined to save this charmless and ill-fated production, seemingly on the strength of their two performances.
And just when you think it can't get any worse, Schultz and Savoini abandon the depths of Arden's scrubby forest for what must be its sewage lagoon (judging from the almost unceasing sound of rushing water), using rope to outline a fictitious slough and then asking this ill-fated crew to frolic therein like a bunch of frantic waterbabies in the midst of some bizarre and unobserved drought.
Maybe in the end, Schultz hoped that if he gave his poor cast enough rope, they would all simply hang themselves, and thereby transform a poorly conceived and directed As You Like It into a ground-breaking All's Well That Ends Well.
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