Where is the lust?

I gleaned little serious amusement, pleasure or enlightenment from director Gregory Thompson's weird assault upon this romantic pastoral comedy.

The perverse production, which disappointingly launches Michael Boyd's artistic directorship of the Royal Shakespeare Company, has the singular distinction of being the ugliest looking As You Like It I have ever seen. Ugliness is not, of course, necessarily a bar to illumination: Robert LePage thrillingly staged A Midsummer Night's Dream in a hideous mudbath world, the lovers trapped in its quicksands.

Thompson's production, however, lacks quirks of invention, except in the first, riveting moments when Martin Hutson's interestingly vulnerable Orlando glumly saws chunks of wood. Suddenly he collapses in helpless sobs and clings to old Adam like a helpless, hopeless child.

His life-predicament becomes clear. Otherwise designer Colin Peters baldly conceives the Duke's sinister court - men in frock coats and fancy bow ties, women in big bustle dresses - as a steeply tilted platform, surrounded by snow-flakes. For the Forest of Arden scenes, segments of this platform are detached, placed against walls and turned round, revealing either green fungal growths or brussel-sprouts everywhere attached to them.

These gross, repellent appurtenances provide no atmospheric support for Shakespeare's vision of Arden, either as an Arcadia or a grim, fearful forest through which Nina Sosanya's Rosalind, Orlando and Naomi Frederick's sweet, fragile Celia must struggle towards selfdiscovery.

This is a blank, characterless Arden, with just a few bird sounds and actors comically playing trees and sheep. David Fielder's Jaques prowls around in a skull-cap but never discovers his character's sad, despairing essence. There are scant climactic changes to mark emotional changes.

Miss Sosanya, when dressed up as Ganymede in long jacket, high boots and shirt looks, sounds and behaves perfectly like a cute teenage youth. Mimicry, though, is not enough. Her phlegmatic Rosalind, whose slack, unaristocratic diction includes "towld" for "told" and "lidy" for "lady", is never smitten or bitten by eros and longing. She's not fathoms deep in love, more like five nautical inches under. She fails to relish the flirtation and game-playing with Hutson, a compellingly gauche, intense Orlando, who never dares let himself go and fall for Ganymede. The grave, randiness of Natasha Gordon's shepherdess in waiting briefly flashes in a production where love, longing and lust are muted elements.

Until 8 November. Box office: 0870 609 1110.

As You Like It