A pastoral comedy, the most musical of all Shakespeare’s plays, As You Like It dives into the subject of love and the misunderstanding of gender and identity, presenting Rosalind, one of the greatest and most elaborate feminine characters of the author’s work. With a new translation by Daniel Jonas, Beatriz Batarda works alongside an absolutely exceptional cast to help us unravel this particularly interwoven yarn, a comedy of manners and deceit skilfully cross-dressing as a fierce exercise of criticism towards those social practices enforcing unhappiness and injustice. Or, if we like it, to help us laugh about the chaotic nature of the relation between sexuality, romantic relationships and power, dismantling their tragic scope and implementing a vitalist idealisation of existence.

“With this show, my bigger ambition is to explore the play’s language and the naivety of its universe, alongside this group of actors, until their bodies translate a time that is forgotten. I truly hope that we can all plunge into a kind of deep bucolic dream distanced from reality. This will be my affectionate tribute to a time of poverty, hope and revolution lived during the 70’s in Portugal.”

Beatriz Batarda