Page 105 - Shakespeare in the Movie From the Silent Era to Shakespeare in Love

94 I Shakespeare in the Movies

An Ill-Favored Thing
As You Like It
Squirrel-Sands Films, 1992; Christine Edzard

Modern dress can work well for Shakespeare on screen or stage,
though only if performed with full understanding of, and proper
respect for, the intent of any individual play. That was not the case,
at least for most English critics, with this self-consciously bizarre
approach to one of the most charming comedies ever written. Here,
Orlando (James Fox) is banished from contemporary London, a con-
cept which might have played if only he subsequently fell in in love
with Rosalind (Emma Croft) in a fitting up-to-the-minute equivalent
of Arden. Instead, Orlando goes from bad to worse, stepping into an
unrelentingly grim slum where, in place of shepherds and swains,
the young duke encounters the homeless, living in cardboard boxes.
"It sounds as ugly as it looks," Lawrence Halliwell noted, "with
some wretched speaking of the verse." Nigel Andrews, in London's
Financial Times, likewise complained: "We feel like victims of a
mobile theater experiment, moving our camp stools from one daft
venue to the next as we follow a bunch of under-rehearsed actors
belting it out into the void." As always, there were those who defend
anything remotely avant-garde. Adam Mars-Jones of the Indepen-
dent, though critical, proved kinder owing to such an aesthetic: "In
this misguided and also perversely endearing version, Christine
Edzard ultimately proves the Bard's resilience, but she proves it the
hard way." Such a comment suggests this film was far more
amenable to those who enjoy the offbeat and experimental, rather
than a high-quality traditional approach to what was intended, in
truth, as an appealingly conventional play. Only Ilona Halberstadt, of
Sight and Sound—the British film magazine long famed for cheering-
on any attempt at outrageous cinema—offered a rave: "Edzard
restores to filmed Shakespeare the means and immediacy of cinema,
daring to present, as the theater has been doing since the nineteenth
century, Shakespearean text in a modern context." Though live the-
ater has indeed been doing just that, any single modern-context per-
formance on stage or screen ought to be praised or damned not for
the approach, but for the degree of success achieved within its con-
text. Due to generally negative reactions, this motion picture has
not, as we go to print, been officially screened in the United States.