As You Fucking Like It

In a version by Bastian Kraft

#fools #desire #gender trouble

"All the world’s a stage / And all the men and women merely players." And in this case, there are four actors all playing the main character, Rosalinde. Or are they playing an Elizabethan male actor playing the role of Rosalinde? Or a post-feminist actress playing an Elizabethan actor playing the role of Rosalind, who in turn disguises herself as a man and pretends to be a woman?

In any case, Rosalinde is at the centre of the confusion that turns the heads of many characters in the forest of Arden. But even if love makes them all fools, their wordplay is razor-sharp and the last means with which they can assert themselves in an absurdly distorted reality. The forest of Arden is a place where all rules are temporarily suspended: a retreat for those expelled by society, a utopian place of an autonomous counterculture with its enticing promises of freedom, and a place where those seeking refuge find themselves and love again. In a pleasurably subversive eradication of norms, Bastian Kraft subjects As you like it to a queer reading, presenting a gender comedy that re-examines the classic Shakespearean play as a liberating and touching drama of confusion and transformation.

Note: in the performance As You Fucking Like It strobe effects is used.