Splitting the Critics!


As You Like It............Or Not!

1967

There is a striking Jaques by Alan Howard, one of the best players in the company.....

Alan Howard's Jaques is a lack-lustre performance too melancholy to engage our sympathy....

Jaques.........played with ice-cool precision....

Alan Howard's Jaques dominates the stage......

Alan Howard plays Jaques with a slow, cynical relish....

The Jaques theme...gabbled shamelessly by Alan Howard, pulls the whole miserably out of shape......

Alan Howard's measured Jaques.....

Alan Howard is a Jaques, cold by nature, to the point of indifference......

Alan Howard played him more miserable than melancholic - there is a difference......

Alan Howard's Jaques, the most grinning melancholic on record.....

.......the sardonic Jaques has both pain and regret in a most reflective performance....

One great success of Jones' production is Alan Howard's Jaques - a white-faced, haunted apparition of walking pain.....

Alan Howard's entertaining Jaques......

..........Alan Howard... gave a caustic sophistication to the part of Jaques.....

Jaques

..... Alan Howard is a commanding figure as the brooding, melancholy Jaques.......

The melancholy Jaques is impressively portrayed by Alan Howard......

Alan Howard rails handsomely as Jaques, sourly enjoying himself like a sarcastic schoolmaster but lingering a shade too obviously on some of the more famous lines......

.....he points the lines in a way that makes them sound new.....


1968

Alan Howard was outstanding as the cynical Jaques......

........ suitably melancholic......

......some brilliantly inventive acting by Alan Howard as the melancholy Jaques.....

Alan Howard's Jaques is entirely drained of the sardonic melancholy which gives such poignancy to his lines..........

Mr. Howard builds up a remarkably complete portrait of a diseased cynic, conceivably suffering from the pox........

Alan Howard's Jaques, brooding yet mellow, is also quite brilliant........

Alan Howard's Jaques seems perversely to ignore the mordant, sardonic humour of the part......

....this is a superb and original performance, disturbing and enlightening.....

Alan Howard's Jaques, especially, is too calculated and narcissistic......

[Jaques] played by Alan Howard, is not so much melancholy as disdainful and bored

Alan Howard is a slightly brighter Jaques and is much the better for it....

......Alan Howard, with his highly individual Jaques which, like Mr. Howard himself, has matured.....

...But Alan Howard's Jaques has also gained in authority and it is arguable that this is an even greater asset to the production. Where last year his melancholy was so sombre as to appear petulant it now rings out like a church bell reminding man of his mortality......

Alan Howard's gloomy Jaques has an excellent hunched posture* and moody walk but introduces caesuras into his speeches where they serve no intelligent function. "All the World's a Stage" was clipped into very odd fragments....

...His Seven Ages speech is most meaningful and memorable......

* practising the 'Stratford Stoop' perhaps? (The name given to the technique of bouncing the voice from a point on the stage to the back of the auditorium)

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Playing Shakespeare/As You Like It