SOURCE: Duncan-Jones, Katherine. “Fidelity in a Forest.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5218 (4 April 2003): 20.

In the following review, Duncan-Jones offers a mixed assessment of Gregory Thompson's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staging of As You Like It, praising the principal actors' performances, but lamenting the director's emphasis on somberness and his gratuitous theatrical interpolations.

As You Like It has always attracted adapters. The earliest performance record we have is not of the play itself, but of Charles Johnson's Love in a Forest (1723), which pasted bits of it together with extracts from several other plays, including Richard II. But this was one of Johnson's least successful ventures, running at Drury Lane for only five performances. Analogously, Francesco Veracini's baroque opera Rosalinda ran for a mere ten performances at Drury Lane in 1741, and has never enjoyed a major revival. No adapted version has achieved the box-office success enjoyed by many “straight” productions from...