As You Like It review – Northern Broadsides stage a dreamy quest

A vibrant forged of characters dance around the maypole on the finish of Laurie Sansom’s gender-quizzical staging. Designer EM Parry matches them out with a dressing-up field of mix-and-match outfits: sheepskin coat, cowboy hat, naval tunic, wedding ceremony veil, bodice and ruff. It isn't fairly an Adam and the Ants video but it surely has a new-romantic sense of flamboyance and chance. There are naked chests and crinoline underskirts.

It's the fruits of a Northern Broadsides manufacturing of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy that's all about appearances. It takes place in a forest of hat stands beneath a cover of attire; a altering room the place everybody is modified.

Right here, the play’s seek for romantic partnership can also be a quest for id – so typically decided by what we put on. It could possibly be the go well with of shimmering gold sported by a hirsute Ali Gadema as Duke Frederick or the colorful cabaret outfits proven off by Joe Morrow’s Touchstone.

Charming … EM Williams with Shaban Dar as Orlando. Photograph: Andrew Billington

There's something dreamlike about this. Incessantly on this languid, autumnal manufacturing, Sansom fills the stage with folks, bathed in a hazy gentle, extra imaginary than actual. The beautiful accent of Adam Kashmiry’s Jacques, cast in Alexandria and Glasgow, provides to the otherworldly ambiance. Solely Rosalind and Celia are in management. Everybody else is buffeted round.

On this means, the manufacturing appears to be telling its personal story. Shakespeare’s narrative, which resolves with a collection of heterosexual couplings, is at odds with the non-binary ethos of the present. It’s not that the playwright himself didn’t play video games with id; a boy actor would have performed Rosalind who pretends to be man who role-plays as a girl. It’s that the narrative conventions are too straight for this manufacturing.

Right here, probably the most compelling relationship is between Rosalind, a playful, expressive EM Williams, and Celia, a joyful, delicate Isobel Coward. Celia’s declaration that “thou and I'm one” when the 2 are banished into the Forest of Arden overshadows even the charming courtship between Rosalind and Shaban Dar’s Orlando.

It implies that when Rosalind and Celia go away the stage to organize for the large reveal, you’re dissatisfied after they don’t return as one of many joyful couples.

• On the New Vic theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, till 26 February and touring till 2 July.