As You Like It: Rose Ayling-Ellis is eloquence itself, but why the annoying Shakespeare-shearing elsewhere?

Is the West End’s new kid on the block poised to deliver a massive boot up the backsides of the usual bastions of Shakespeare? There’s little doubt about it: Josie Rourke’s staging of As You Like It, the first in-house production at Nimax’s recently opened 602-seat theatre, @sohoplace, demonstrates just how well suited this hip and happening upstart is to classical-theatrical revels.

Transport wise it couldn’t be more central; better connected than the RSC’s sometime haunt, the Barbican. Moreover, its in-the-round configuration has an intimacy and warmth to match the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse (the indoor space at Shakespeare's Globe), while offering more creature comforts. And it’s as if Rourke is cocking a snook at that latter Bankside venue with a candlelit opening sequence that looks immaculately rivalrous.

After Michael Bruce’s brooding pianist tinkers at a prominent baby grand, loop-technology building a tuneful polyphony, in sweeps Martha Plimpton, goblet in hand, head encircled in a ruff, black dress extravagantly trailing, as if she’s stepped from an Elizabethan-era painting.

Lustily, and thrillingly, she and the ensemble sing lines usually heard in Act II: “Blow, blow, thou winter’s wind...” That’s one of Bruce’s many arrangements, the composer in situ and tinkling throughout, like a silent-cinema accompanist but also a presiding creative spirit, almost as though the action is flowing from the keyboard.

A quaint candle chandelier and an autumnal inundation of paper shreds compounds the sense of welcoming the theatre’s newcomers with nothing too radical to affright the uninitiated. And the picturesque accessibility of the production affirms that, with its gentle mirth and breezy melancholy (languidly incarnated by Plimpton’s Jaques), the play offers a restorative counter to end­-of-year gloom. The Forest of Arden is an uncertain place of dislocating removal from ‘society’ – it’s where the lovers Orlando and Rosalind flee – but it’s also a site of rousing, liberating amity.

The beating heart of the production lies in that ardent central pair. Alfred Enoch is a wonderfully upright, gangling Orlando, a startled fawn of a boy who proves his mettle in an early wrestling match, then wanders in a daze under the confusing charm of Leah Harvey’s radiant cross-dressed Rosalind, the latter so smitten she dabs her fingers on the wrestling mat, as if trying to mop up Orlando’s presence.

Left reeling too by the romantic upsets is Rose Ayling-Ellis as her cousin Celia. The nationally adored Strictly winner and EastEnders star’s use of BSL and theatrical gestures are harnessed initially to foster a conspiratorial closeness with Rosalind (who reciprocates in kind), before she’s effectively elbowed aside, Ayling-Ellis proving as eloquent in her silent distress as she is surprisingly vocal in railing at her lordly ogre of a father (although there are useful text-surtitles on all sides).

Those surtitles could be more legible, even so. I also felt less persuaded by some of the line-cutting and phrase-amending elsewhere. “Get you with him, you old dog” has become “old witch”, presumably in view of the fact that June Watson (terrific) now plays the aged servant Adam, but that rather chips the canine wit of her response: “I have lost my teeth in your service”. In 2023, please let’s have a little more Shakespeare as he wrote it, not as directors fancy it.

Until Jan 28. Tickets: sohoplace.org