First staged by the Nottingham Playhouse Company for the 1975 Edinburgh Festival, where it was the oustanding success of the season. As Clive Barnes wrote for The New York Times: "...it was the best play I saw during the festival...Mr Gill... has a feeling for the way young people act, and his staging of 'As You Like It' seemed to be an Arcadian testimony to youth... The pattern, the mood, and the particular bucolic elegance are his own. This is an 'As You Like It' lost and dreaming in a Shakespearean summer, Jane Lapotaire is enchanting as Rosalind - perhaps the best since Vanessa Redgrave - gauce, confident and beautiful, and John Price makes the most personable Orlando. The charm of the production was quite simply in its insistence on the text and its feeling for the mood and tempo of the play".

The London production of Peter Gill's production of "As You Like It" was presented especially to fit the informal scenery of the new Riverside Studios - different scenery and costumes from the Edinburgh staging - and used local musicians and children.



Riverside Studios
30 May 1976
Peter Gill's production of
As You Like It
by William Shakespeare


Cast (in order of speaking):

John Price   Orlando
Leslie Sarony   Adam
David Bailie   Oliver
Malcolm Ingram   Dennis
Garry McDermott   Charles
Zoe Wanamaker   Celia
Jane Lapotaire   Rosalind
Nigel Hawthorne   Touchstone
Peter Myers   La Beau
Anthony Douse   Duke Frederick
Patrick Holt   The Banished Duke
George Fenton   Amiens
Malcolm Ingram   A Lord
Derek Carpenter   A Lord
Matthew Scurfield   A Courtier
Anthony Douse   Corin, A Shepherd
James Hazeldine   Silvius, A Shepherd
John Normington   Jaques
Susan Porrett   Audrey
Leslie Sarony   Sir Oliver Martext
Caroline Hutchison   Phebe, A Shepherdess
Matthew Scurfield   William
Anthony Douse   Hymen
Malcolm Ingram   Jaques de Boys

Other parts played by members of the company

Director   Peter Gill
Decor   William Dudley
Lighting   Rory Dempster
Music   George Fenton


As You Like It, Riverside Studios

Irving Wardle, Times June 1, 1976

In the heaviest week for Shakespeare I can remember, I doubt whether anything better will turn up than Peter Gill's As You Like It, which was revived on Sunday night as part of the opening Festival of the Riverside Studios. Hammersmith bought this marvellous property from the BBC two years ago, and are pouring �95 000 into its conversion and giving it a sustaining grant as an arts centre for an artistic desert with a population the size of Leicester. With the equivalent of two theatres and a cinema, plus about forty usable spaces, the possibilities are enormous. The place opened with a bang over the weekend, jazz concerts, dance, film, open rehearsals, and wisely giving more emphasis to professional standards than to local talent.

The two came together in Sunday's show, where a cast including Nigel Hawthorne and John Normington mingled with packs of cart-wheeling 10-year-olds and a group of local instrumentalists.

The atmosphere was that of an affectionate game, in which the spectators became more and more involved (thanks partly to an interval Punch and Judy show with everyone gather round). "So this is the forest of Arden", Jane Lapotaire mused incredulously, studying the great girder-roofed barn which lately housed This is Your Life and Dr Who.Well, yes, it might be.