As You Like It: Shakespeare’s timeless play at ROSL Garden, London

“As You Like It” Shakespeare: All the World’s a Stage

Shakespeare returns to the ROSL garden this summer with Illyria’s production of As You Like It. Set in the Forest of Arden, the play’s themes of nature, freedom, transformation and love come alive in an outdoor setting, making it the perfect Shakespeare play to watch in the stunning surroundings of our Clubhouse garden.

Illyria’s Artistic Director Oliver Gray tells us what makes As You Like It so unique.

Why This Shakespeare Play Stands Out

If a romantic comedy can be summed up as “girl meets boy; girl loses boy; girl wins boy,” then As You Like It is Shakespeare’s most quintessential romantic comedy. However, it is perhaps also his most experimental play.

Unlike almost any other romantic comedy, this one starts with a coup, multiple banishments and two attempted murders.

On the same day that Rosalinde, daughter of the banished Duke, is herself banished, impoverished Orlando, with whom she is smitten, foils his older brother’s plot to have him killed by escaping to the Forest of Arden. There the two meet up again, but now Rosalinde, for her own safety, is disguised as a boy called Ganymede.

Lovesick Orlando allows “Ganymede” to cure him of his love by “pretending” to be Rosalinde, who makes him woo her and reacts in a thoroughly fickle way to his courtship. In the midst of all this, we are introduced to the banished Duke, who also now lives in the Forest of Arden with his peers, and sundry other shepherds, goatherds and forest folk.

From Drama to Comedy

In no other play does Shakespeare switch genre so abruptly and with quite so profound an effect. The tense, early scenes set in the court feature loyalty and betrayal, friendship and hatred, politics and corruption.

The conflict in each is either dangerously physical or has life-or-death consequences. The audience is led to believe the play’s genre is drama or thriller.

But when the characters move to the Forest of Arden it is as though a weight is lifted from them. The action is no longer visceral and threatening because it has now migrated into the hearts of the characters instead.

This neat trick of switching genre evokes a feeling of release – at last, the characters on stage can be their true selves.

Love in the Forest of Arden

From this point, the play focuses heavily on the subject of love. We are offered no fewer than four romantic relationships, each culminating in marriage, each illustrating one aspect of love.

These are love at first sight, as depicted by Oliver and Celia; emotional manipulation, represented by the haughty shepherdess Phebe and the adoring Silvius; lust, played out by Touchstone the clown and Audrey the goatherd and finally, and explored most playfully and thoroughly, attraction, respect and shared values, embodied by Rosalinde and Orlando.

All are mined for laughs and contrived to a climax where everyone’s problems can only be solved by Rosalinde revealing who she really is.

Four Ways Shakespeare Examines Love

1. Rosalinde is not unique among Shakespeare’s female characters to adopt a male persona. Portia does so to electrifying effect in The Merchant of Venice, written just a year or two previously. So does Viola in Twelfth Night, written a year or two later. But only in As You Like It does Shakespeare exploit the gender ambivalence of a male actor playing a female character, adopting a male role, notably naming herself Ganymede after the mythological male lover of Jove himself, who pretends to be a female. This Russian-doll structure makes her interactions with her lover feel both layered and real. And when another woman declares her love for her, the comic situation only intensifies.
2. “Men are April when they woo, December when they wed,” says Rosalinde, as Ganymede, as Rosalinde to the man she adores; she continues, “Maids are May when they are maids, but the sky changes when they are wives!” Rather like the abrupt switch of genre, this discordant epithet and many others like it strips away rose-tinted rom-com platitudes, leaving in their place an array of icy, sharp witticisms about the realities of love. Whether or not they really are true is of course, another matter.
3. Plenty of Shakespeare’s plays written before As You Like It feature one character testing another: either their promise to keep a ring in The Merchant of Venice, their loyalty to the King’s cause in Henry V or a wife’s marital fidelity by a hysterically jealous husband in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But As You Like It is his first play where one character, Rosalinde, exposes another to a sustained trial about the strength of his love. Furthermore, the trial doesn’t just resolve nicely; Shakespeare pushes it to the point where Orlando’s mental well-being is in danger of collapsing. In later plays such as Measure for Measure and The Tempest, the trial is pushed even further; in King Lear, to the point where an entire kingdom falls apart. What starts as a flirtatious game mutates into something Rosalinde can no longer bear — a brilliant writer’s device to express the extent of love on both sides of the trial.
4. Everyone on a first date is a slightly different or heightened version of their real selves, but in As You Like It, Shakespeare dramatises that simple truth by having Rosalinde literally playing a role, something that surely strikes chords with us all. In reverse, her father, the banished Duke, speaks of the relief of now being free from the pressures of having to maintain a guarded demeanour at court. Jaques, one of the lords who accompanied him into the forest, has one of the most famous lines Shakespeare ever wrote: “All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players. / They have their exits and their entrances / And one man in his time plays many parts.”

Why Outdoor Theatre Works So Well

Shakespeare believed not just that role-playing is real life, but that the place to see all life is the theatre. When the Globe first opened in 1599, inscribed above the main entrance was the motto “Totus Mundus Agit Histrionem”, the Latin quote Shakespeare has Jaques speak aloud in translation.

This is one of the reasons why many scholars believe As You Like It was the first play staged in the new theatre, a view supported by the fact that Shakespeare’s rivals, The Admiral’s Men, had recently enjoyed huge success at the nearby Rose Theatre with a play by Anthony Munday called The Downfall of Robert Earl of Huntingdon – the first dramatisation of Robin Hood.

Shakespeare’s company needed to pack out their new, much larger, theatre with a hit, so as outlaws were clearly the flavour of the month, what better than to commission an outlaw play of their own? Applying the test of history, who’s ever heard of Munday’s play today?

The sudden gear change in genre in As You Like It chimes with a modern audience in a further way when the play is performed outdoors. Once the action moves to the Forest of Arden, audiences are reminded of leaving behind the strictures of indoor theatres, of sitting in straight rows, of having their knees painfully rammed up against the back of the seat in front, and of being prevented from taking their drinks and food into the auditorium.

Here, people can relax, top up glasses, and tuck into picnics. They can take photos freely or even murmur to friends without being hushed by fellow patrons.

Open-air performances engender a festival atmosphere, where a beautiful environment becomes as much a part of the experience as the performance itself. At Illyria, we love performing outdoors because it is such a levelling experience. When it rains, we all get wet, audience and actors alike, but when it’s glorious, we all share in the same magic.

Of course, Shakespeare wrote almost all his plays to be performed outdoors, and those actually set outdoors, such as As You Like It, work especially well with no walls to contain them and only the sky above.

Plan Your Visit

Join us for an enchanting summer evening in the ROSL Garden with Illyria’s production of As You Like It on 10 July 2026. Book your ticket via our events page here.