As You like It

Rosalind flees her uncle's court in disguise, escaping into the Forest of Arden where freedom tastes like air and love arrives wearing the wrong face. Disguised as a young man called Ganymede, she watches her beloved Orlando stumble through the woods, pining for a woman he thinks is somewhere else entirely. What follows is Shakespeare's most playful meditation on love and identity: she persuades him to pretend that she (as Ganymede) is his Rosalind, rehearsing their courtship in the space between performance and truth. Around them, the forest swells with exiles, poets, fools, and a melancholy lord named Jaques who famously declares that all the world's a stage. The play pivots on a delicious contradiction - Rosalind is a woman pretending to be a man pretending to be a woman, and we are asked to consider what any of that has to do with what we feel. It is comedy, certainly, but comedy sharp enough to draw blood.