Sheffield Theatre's utterly irresistible production sets the standard for As You Like Its for the next decade, and Victoria Hamilton shoots straight to the top of the roster of great Rosalinds. Director Michael Grandage has cracked this most difficult egg, Shakespeare's 1599 romantic satire that so seldom lives up to expectations.
In theory it is a wonderfully rich psychological and social exploration of the liberating possibilities of love and of new ways to organise society. In production it often comes across as formal and schematic, the banter between the lovers dry and archaic, Orlando an immature boy and Rosalind an irritating know-it-all. As for the plot, has anyone ever really got to grips with its meanderings?
From the opening court scene played out in a grey, high-windowed state room to a Forest of Arden symbolised just by three tall trees, Grandage's production has a grave simplicity as it charts, with a flurry of snowflakes or the flutter of leaves, the journey from emotional winter to the joyous arrival of spring and the blossoming of true love.
While always visually arresting, the triumph of this production is in its clarity of storytelling. There is never a dull moment, but there is also none of that extraneous funny business that directors so often feel obliged to insert. The other key to Grandage's production is its glorious emotional spontaneity and the depth of the characterisations. Every single role, even the very smallest, has its own distinct and fiercely beating heart. Hamilton makes every line sound as if its has just formed like a bubble in her brain.
But it is not just this Rosalind who supplies new perspectives. Samantha Spiro is an unusually spirited Celia, quite Rosalind's equal and prepared to show her friend her disapproval; Lucy Briers and Martin Hutson's Phebe and Sylvius are not the usual stock country bumpkins but lovers for whom love and hate are near cousins, and Nicholas Le Prevost's Jaques is a man whose dry, donnish approach to life keeps him at arm's length from humanity.
But the heart, mind, and soul of this production belongs to the would-be lovers, Orlando and Rosalind. Ben Daniels as the disinherited younger son develops from loose-limbed, hot-headed adolescent into radical new man. The sexual electricity between him and Hamilton's Rosalind is so great that you actually long for them to fall upon and ravish each other to relieve the tension.
What is there to say about Hamilton's Rosalind except that she is mercurial, full of heart and so touchingly confused when smitten by love that it is almost as if all the skin has been stripped away from her and she is a walking wound. She makes love seem hilarious, excruciatingly painful and so absolutely necessary for both the individual and society.
Till March 25. Box office: 0171-741 2311.