British Black and Asian Shakespeare Performance Database
As You Like It (1992): Grices Wharf, Sands Films
PRINCIPAL CAST: Celia Bannerman (Celia); Emma Croft (Rosalind); James Fox (Jaques); Griff Rhys Jones (Touchstone); Andrew Tiernan (Orlando).
This was a low-budget film set in contemporary London.
"On now to the indestructible Shakespeare; at least he seemed indestructible until Christine Edzard's As You Like It. As though stung by criticism of her fetish for period detail, the director of Little Dorrit and The Fool strips her new film bare. For costumes, look for little more than jeans and anoraks; for the Forest of Arden, a derelict docklands site requisitioned by the homeless. Shakespeare's words remain, more or less, but nothing good comes of them. For the cast have been left to run amok. Some, like Griff Rhys Jones's Touchstone, run too far; it is often hard to hear what he says. Others, like the Orlando and Rosalind of Andrew Tiernan and Emma Croft, run too little. Can this lifeless film be based on a play that dances with wisdom and wit?" ~ The Times, 8 October 1992
"Edzard chooses not to show the wrestling match between Charles and Orlando except through the reactions of spectators. Here, pure cinematic skill must carry the day, or not, when the effect is as flat as it is here." ~ Adam Mars-Jones, "Putting the Bard through his paces", Independent, 9 October 1992
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- British Black and Asian Shakespeare Database by the University of Warwick, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council 2012-2015, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. See full copyright statement.