SHAKESPEAREAN comedy is known to be difficult to stage, but Canberra’s Shakespeare by the Lakes is giving it a go with the coming production of “As You Like It”.

It’s not the first time the play has been done on the lake – I remember an actor friend sliding down an embankment at Aspen Island into the waters of Lake Burley Griffin during an earlier production.

This time around, they’ll be a little more distant from the water. 

Previewing in a paid event at Verity Lane Markets on February 15 then opening free to the public at the Patrick White Lawns on February 19, they’ll perform a mixture of free and paid shows at locations as varied as Tuggeranong Town Park and Eastlake, Gungahlin.

With a top cast directed by well-known professional Tony Knight at the helm, it’s looking good and, as I found, the two leads, Natasha Vickery as Rosalind and Jake Fryer-Hornsby as her opposite number, Orlando, are taking the task of comedy very seriously indeed.

The pair studied acting at the WA Academy of Performing Arts together and it was Vickery who recommended Fryer-Hornsby to Knight for the role – now they’re having to really get up close and personal.

Vickery has the lioness’ share of the action in what is universally regarded as Shakespeare’s greatest female role – “because of her intelligence and her independence, and because she has a huge capacity for love,” she says.

Briefly, after meeting the love of her life, Rosalind, banished by her uncle and joined by her beloved cousin Celia, escapes to the idyllic Forest of Arden where Rosalind’s banished father lives. For protection she adopts men’s clothing, but Orlando is there, too, and the plot thickens.

In “As You Like It”, Shakespeare takes the battle of the sexes to an extreme level. Rosalind, a girl character played in Elizabethan times by a boy, dresses up as the boy Ganymede, who then pretends to be a girl in a lovemaking game – it’s a triple whammy when it comes to gender bending.

“Luckily, I’m a woman so one layer is taken off,” Vickery says.

Brought up just around the corner from NIDA, where her mother worked for many years, she first met Knight when she was a little girl.

Rosalind’s capacity for love extends to her cousin Celia, but they do have some fearful rows, a good opportunity for Ylaria Rogers in the role. 

It’s Vickery’s view that Rosalind keeps up the pretence of being a boy for so long because she has more freedom that way – “when Shakespeare puts her in men’s clothes she’s free, she’s just enjoying it too much”. 

Incidentally, Knight is trying a bit of gender-bending, too, having cast mum Karen Vickery as the melancholy Jaques who proclaims the famous words, “all the world’s a stage”.

Fryer-Hornby, a West Australian who was partly schooled in Tampa, Florida, now lives in Sydney and does a lot of outdoor acting, including regular stints in “The Wind in the Willows” at the Botanic Gardens, where he usually plays Otter.

Although still quite young, he’s something of a Shakespeare veteran who, on graduating, joined Bell Shakespeare company‘s “Players” troupe and got to play all his dream roles – Iago, Hamlet, Romeo, Mercutio, but never Orlando.

“I’d never come across Orlando before, a blessing really, because it’s really nice to approach the character from the start,” he says.

In the play, Orlando has been cast out by his older brother Oliver after their father dies, but even without the benefit of wealth, he is a natural gentleman and when freed from the court, he finds a world that will accept him. 

“That gentlemanly quality is innate within him,” Fryer-Hornsby says.

It’s the love game between him and Rosalind that constitutes a good deal of the play, but does he know that Ganymede is really Rosalind in disguise? 

“Yes, he does realise what’s going on at some point in the play, but he always gets to go along with the game,” Fryer-Hornsby suggests, but they’re still working out how to make that convincing.

“As You Like It”, February 15-March 6, bookings and all program details at lakespeare.com

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