As You Like It

All the world’s a stage, 
And all the men and women merely players: 
They have their exits and their entrances; 
And one man in his time plays many parts, 
His acts being seven ages. 

Only a few people know that these often heard lines of Shakespeare belong to the melancholic traveller Jaques – one of the characters of the play As You Like It (1599) written in the second period of Shakespeare’s creative work (1595–1599).

The guess is that the title of the play, As You Like It, may have been the great dramatist’s concealed response to the assessors and clients of the play who wished that the creation took into account the demands and taste of the public of the time. W. Shakespeare was not only gifted – he was also a smart artist. He realised that he could increase his audience if the characters and language of his plays were attractive for both the nobility and the lower classes. The playwright combined indecent humour with an exclusively sophisticated and complex humour in order to please an audience as wide as possible. In his plays, he revealed human experiences through the universal topics: love, ambitions, and jealousy. These matters remain comprehensible to the contemporary reader or spectator.

The tragicomedy As You Like It is about Rosalind who is hiding in the forest from the persecution of her noble relatives. At the turn of the sixteenth and seventeenth century, this proposed a totally new conception of love: the prevailing attitude to love as a source of suffering that was adopted from literature is set off by W. Shakespeare against the conception of love as a source of greatest pleasure.

First presented at the Small State Theatre of Vilnius’ festival DramaFest, the performance As You Like It deals with the topics of love, corporality, gender bending, sexuality, and revolution. The performance acted in the cafe situated in the State Small Theatre of Vilnius’ basement transfers spectators to a subterranean underground station. William Shakespeare’s As You Like It is characteristic of a particular fragmentation and great dynamics of the development of spaces. The performance creates an impression of an intensive rhythm of life in a vibrant megapolis. Under cover of W. Shakespeare’s ornate poetic texts, Renaissance costumes, an eclectic combination of Renaissance and contemporary music, As You Like It offers absurdity and phantasy as the only way to free oneself from inert plots.

This production of Shakespeare’s play As You Like It is a radical adaptation where it is not the director who serves the play but namely the play becomes a material for one’s creation and self-expression. This kind of adaptation is condensed through the perspective of topic rather than that of a character’s consistency. 

The creative work of director Uršulė Bartoševičiūtė is characteristic of a theatre balancing on the edge of kitsch, absurd, and camp, based on phantasy and artfulness, which remains the basic key to her creative work that emphasises the fragmentation of the world. Bartoševičiūtė’s creative work at the Small Theatre of Vilnius is a significant step in this State theatre’s opening up to new forms, contemporary styles, and topics that are relevant and require courage to deal with. The director notes that the projected audience of this experimental performance is spectators who can tolerate the fragmentation of art and its incoherence, who are open to theatricality, and will not be scared off by the visual noise and stylistic play at the limit of taste.

Additional information:

(Ages 16+): explicit content, violence, tobacco products.