Cooke's inventive love games

I am left far less starry-eyed by Dominic Cooke's traditionally minded, long-winded, modern-dress production than many critics were at its Stratford premiere last August.

Admittedly, Cooke puts some inventive imprints upon the comedy. He scorns the familiar seasonal approach, by which Rosalind and Celia flee the Duke's court to a wintery Forest of Arden where spring breaks through when love shows its hand and summer ushers in all-round romancing: Rae Smith's inflexible, unchanging set, which offers no sign of a court, consists of a giant tree in full leafy bloom, around which snow oddly falls.

This initial conflation of seasons gives way to spring-time, though there is no crucial, atmospheric sense of rising sap and escape from winter, since winter has hardly existed.

Cooke's tactic of having the Duke and his exiled brother in Arden played by the same performer and their separate retinues by the same actors appears intended - wrongly I think - to suggest court and rustic/pastoral life are inherently related.

The comic lovers - from Paul Chahidi's barrow boy Touchstone to Meg Fraser's roaring-girl Audrey - remain ponderously unamusing. The complex love-games of Rosalind and Orlando, though, come with an exciting erotic potential.

Sexy, lissom Lia Williams ranks as a mature Rosalind falling for a cute Orlando (Barnaby Kay) years her junior. Memorably smitten at first sight by Orlando, who fights a dirty wrestling match, Williams then perversely betrays none of the vulnerability, pathos or desperation of an older Rosalind.

Disguised in hat, trousers and trainers as Ganymede in Arden, this Rosalind dutifully swaggers and struts, but shows few signs of romantic agony or androgyny. Her voice keeps its female timbre.

Kay's superb Orlando also skirts the worrying question of sexual ambivalence. Luckily, his performance is charged with high-voltage desire and ardour until, thanks to clever scenic and verbal emphasis, news is relayed to him of Ganymede's true identity.

Thereafter Kay reacts to Ganymede's flirtations in delightful, delighted attitudes of amusement. Meantime, a brilliant Amanda Harris, bespectacled and dowdy as Celia, offers tart, ironic antidotes to romantic sloppiness until she lets her hair down, by love surprised.

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