Review: As You Like It ****

At West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

CHRIS Cully and his props team at WYP have performed theatrical magic – a real timber pine forest apparently growing out of the stage and stretching into a canopy of leaves constructed above. This is only one of the many highly successful aspects of Ian Brown's production of William Shakespeare's As You Like It.

The Forest of Arden, a mythical French woodland, is a major player in the piece and it hosts a motley collection of exiles from court life and rustics, all there for different reasons and wandering about trying to make sense of life, love, the universe and everything.

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For all there is little action in this long piece, it is full of feeling and philosophy, whether the pearls of wisdom fall from the mouths of the usurped Duke Senior, the wonderful wandering thinker Jacques, Touchstone the sage fool or Rosalind, who has dressed as a man as she searches for her father and her love, Orlando.

Rosalind, played by the luminous Vanessa Kirby (one year out of university), weaves a web around her by manipulating lovers and would-be lovers to do the right thing. She gives Orlando lessons in love, and he seems in danger of loving Rosalind-as-Ganymede as much as he loves her as a woman.

The second part of the play seemed a little flatter and lacking in dramatic high points than the first, but that said Brown has somehow summoned up a freshness and accessibility to his reading of it that has great immediacy. Who would have thought the most clichd soliloquy "All the world's a stage..." could be given the emotional depth and pathos that Matthew Flynn brings to it here? His lines on the seven ages of man make the listener squirm in recognition.

Displaced citizens find knowledge and understanding amid the calm, healing pastoral environment and return to the city as happier and better people. Love as a sickness and torment has been healed by love and more love. If only conflict resolution were this simple. Brown has found a five-star cast, among which Kirby shines as a breathtaking new talent.

To October 16.