As You like It – East Riddlesden Hall Renowned Shakespeare group The Lord Chamberlain’s Men brought the Bard’s hilarious gender bending comedy As You Like It to East Riddlesden Hall in Keighley last week.

The group – the number one open-air Shakespeare touring company in the UK – is made up entirely of men, and perform the plays as they would have been at the Globe Theatre – with the female characters played by men in drag and cast members playing multiple roles.

As You Like It makes full use of this novelty, as the lead female character in the play – Rosalind (Isaac Stanmore) – spends much of the play pretending to be a man to escape her tyrannical uncle.

The story revolves around different groups of people who find sanctuary in a wood after all being either banished or chased from their home kingdom. When they come together, love and marriage proposals come thick and fast.

Watching a man playing a woman pretending to be a man went down a storm with the crowd, as did the play’s other larger-than-life characters of bawdy knaves and fools.

And the novelty of seeing one actor (Nicholas Stafford) play a wrestler, elderly shepherd, Duke and female goatherd added to the comedy value, but like all of Shakespeare’s works, the real beauty was in the witty wordplay.

With the specially-erected stage just metres from the National Trust property and the evening sun warming the crowd, the one-off performance went down a storm.

Chris Young