As You Like It A Radical Retelling (EIF)
★★★★☆ Remarkable
Church Hill Theatre: Wed 20 – Sat 23 Aug 2025
Review by Hugh Simpson
As You Like It A Radical Retelling at the Church Hill in the International Festival is a wonderfully theatrical and challenging piece, dealing with hugely important issues in a way that demands attention.
Talking about this production at any length risks giving away too much about its format and the intentions behind it. Suffice it to say that anyone interested in seeing a piece of theatre that very definitely has the ability to surprise, should go and see it without reading any of the rest of this review (which will still attempt to avoid any unnecessary spoilers).
Logan Cracknell in As You Like It – a Radical retelling. Pic: Dahlia Katz.
Cliff Cardinal, an Indigenous Canadian theatre-maker, has fashioned a response to Shakespeare that is compelling, confrontational and necessarily divisive. That word ‘radical’ in the title is certainly doing more work than some of the others.
The EIF publicity says it is ‘a play strictly for the open-minded… unapologetic and unafraid to confront the thorny truths of our time.’ Certainly the political urgency, dark humour, raw emotion, poetic sensibilities and gleeful artifice of this production from Crow’s Theatre will make many of its audience examine questions about their own inheritance and identity, as much as it makes them confront the inheritance and situation of others.
Careful consideration
Or not. Many are likely to be able to avoid such questions by focusing on what is either a brilliant piece of theatrical manipulation, or something that is altogether less honest in intent, depending on your point of view. Careful consideration would suggest the former is the more correct response.
Thought-provoking isn’t the word; this is more likely to keep your mind whirring, and your heart heavy, into the early hours than just about anything in Edinburgh this month.
Logan Cracknell in As You Like It – a Radical retelling. Pic: Dahlia Katz.
Looked at it purely theatrical terms, it is possible to say that the production becomes a little baggy, and would benefit from shaving off a little from its running time – but in one sense that very bagginess is part of the point of it, and careful structuring by Cardinal, as well as an inherent flexibility, is brilliantly served by Logan Cracknell’s lighting design.
Sorry not to be more informative. But you really should go and see a production that shows that the International Festival retains the capability to shock, entertain (and possibly annoy) and then you’ll know why this review couldn’t say more. Just don’t expect to feel comfortable.
Running time: One hour and 40 minutes (no interval)
Church Hill Theatre, 33 Morningside Rd, EH10 4DR.
Wednesday 20 – Saturday 23 August 2025
Daily: 8.00 pm
Part of the Edinburgh International Festival
Tickets and details: Book here.
Logan Cracknell in As You Like It – a Radical retelling. Pic: Dahlia Katz.
ENDS
