"As You Like It" Designed by Liz Ascroft
"As You Like It" by William Shakespeare
Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester/2000
Director: Marianne Elliot - Lighting: Vince Herbert
DESIGNER: LIZ ASCROFT
(L) The Court scenes - (R) The Forest

The Royal Exchange's module is already a circle that contains a magical energy. It has the gods, the court and the people, separated yet together in its diagram of the universe. For the Court scenes (left image) we smothered the storytelling place with an over-bearing heraldic canopy. It has power over Rosalind and Celia in this moth-balled family that demands duty, drowned in the delusion of rightness, and then ... the weight is lifted (right image) as we go into the forest. The heraldry completely retracted, we return to the module as a storytelling machine where trees are rooted strong - connected and growing up into the magical mechanical canopy.

(For more information about the designer see her entry in the Designers' Register)

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