Our Production Concept - “The Desert Inaccessible”
Leaving a Corporate Wilderness for a Desert Heart
Befitting Such Stuff’s no-frills, contemporary approach to Shakespeare, our As You Like It opens, today. With a corporate kingdom, ripe with greed and jealousy and subterfuge. Then, in Act 2, banishment sends lovers and love-lost, not to rustic Arden Forest, but to Australia’s outback heart.
Live vocals, percussion, and guitar bring a contemporary soundtrack to locate and accentuate the outback exodus of our characters. And so, live renditions of U2’s journeying songs form the aural backdrop for the show.
With their 2023 album Songs of Surrender, U2 also found inspiration from the desert. “We love the desert – it’s the purity of it. The desert’s a pure space, there’s nothing here. It is a magic landscape. But it’s not just a meditative landscape, there’s danger too. You can feel that people have died on this land”. (Bono and The Edge.)
Our task with As You Like It, is connecting and conveying the hidden dangers, and delights, of love in Shakespeare’s story. But, unlike U2’s experience above, our outback setting won’t lead to tragedy. In our story, the characters will encounter love’s extremes and they’ll struggle to keep their feet on rugged ground.
But will they also discover true “liberty, not banishment,” in their lives and in love?