SOURCE: Macaulay, Alastair. “A Rosalind Who Is As We Don't Like It.” Financial Times (3 April 2000): 18.

In the following review, Macaulay dismisses Gregory Doran's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) production of As You Like It as tedious, censuring Doran's uninspired direction, numerous shallow performances, and the musical accompaniment.

As You Like It can cast so many different lights and can show so many depths (“my affection hath an unknown bottom, like the Bay of Portugal”): how come the Royal Shakespeare Company keeps giving it one prettily lightweight and simple-minded production after another?

Gregory Doran's new RSC production is quaintly pretty-pretty tourist-fodder. As designed by Kaffe Fassett and Niki Turner, the Forest of Arden is punctuated by 2-D trees with luminous leaves, and with piles of huge bright tapestry cushions on the patterned floor beneath. In male disguise as Ganymede, Rosalind wears a sweater of the same elaborate patterning.

Doran can...