‘All the men and women merely players’: Lockdown world-building in Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s As You Like It
After performing their inaugural online production Midsummer Night Stream at the end of April, then giving Oscar Wilde the lockdown treatment in their follow-up The Importance of Bcc’ing Earnest, Ctrl-Alt-Repeat returned to Shakespeare this weekend for their third production. Having been cast in the previous two performances, Rachel Waring took on directorial duties for the company’s version of As You Like It. ‘I may have been a little overambitious with this one’ suggests Waring in a video released on Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s social media channels in the run-up to the performance.¹ However, it’s the director’s ambition that drives the production to be undoubtedly Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s most enterprising venture yet.
In keeping with their previous lockdown performances, Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s concept updates As You Like It to the modern day. Duke Frederick’s court as seen in the play becomes Court Games, a video game company run by CEO Frederick Duke (Adam Blake), and the production opens with a report from ‘Le Beau Gaming News’. Charles’s expository speech to Oliver in Act 1 Scene 1 is repurposed as the reporter’s voiceover, as the news package introduces the audience to the key characters and how they have been updated in Waring’s production. The modernisation of the play’s setting brings to mind any number of other Shakespearean adaptations, with the business world backdrop particularly evocative of Michael Almereyda’s Hamlet (2000).
The sense that As You Like It is taking place in a version of our own world is intensified through the repurposing of archive footage, first of Geoff Keighley speaking at the 2016 Game Awards, and then of an interview with J. J. Abrams. Both pieces of footage are reframed so that it appears Keighley and Abrams are talking about Senior Duke (Andrew Caley), Court Games’ founder who has been ousted by his younger brother Frederick as in the play. Combining real world footage with newly created material — such as an interview with Frederick that is abruptly terminated when it turns to his ousting of Senior — lends the production a further sense of parallel reality, more than if Waring had opted for original material alone. I was reminded of the use of real news footage throughout Ralph Fiennes’s Coriolanus (2011), which not only gave the conflict setting of his film a greater sense of authenticity, but also helped link his adaptation to contemporary politics.
Whilst Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s As You Like It is necessarily a much smaller production than Fiennes’s film, the effect of repurposing clips in this way is similar. Those in the gaming community may even recognise that Keighley and Abrams were both originally speaking about celebrated video game designer Hideo Kojima, whose tenure as vice president of games publisher Konami came to an unceremonious end in 2015, with the company coming under fire as a result. Whilst it’s a detail that may go over the heads of many in the audience as they watch (myself included), it’s testament to the level of detail that has gone into building the world in which Waring’s production takes place.
This world-building is epitomised in Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s adaptation of the Forest of Arden into an immersive roleplaying game environment created by Senior. A ‘trailer’ for Arden featured as part of the Le Beau Gaming News report, and was also released by Ctrl-Alt-Repeat on social media as a teaser prior to the production. The trailer describes Arden as ‘a revolutionary social platform where you can share as much or as little about your own identity as you feel comfortable with, with whoever you like’, and where you can ‘customise yourself to look however you want and discover who you really are’. It’s an inspired contemporary take on the forest as a place of social transgression, working perfectly to allow Rosalind (Joanna Brown) and Celia (Rebekah Finch) to adopt their Ganymede and Aliena identities in Arden. It also allowed lines from the play to remain unchanged whilst taking on a fresh meaning. The observation by Jaques (Tom Black), reimagined as a moderator of Arden, that ‘all the men and women [are] merely players’ (2.7.141) resonated anew in the production’s updated world.
Waring’s concept brought to mind any number of sci-fi films, including The Matrix (1999), Source Code (2011) and Ready Player One (2018). However, Charlie Brooker’s dystopian anthology series Black Mirror (2011 — ) felt like the strongest influence. The episodes ‘USS Callister’ and ‘Striking Vipers’ resonated in particular, both of which deal with computer-simulated realities and characters assuming alternative identities — and in the case of the latter, genders — within them. The ominous way in which Arden is introduced both through the trailer and the suggestion during the Le Beau report that Court Games’ releases are infected with surveillance software — an early nod to the reimagining of Touchstone (Steven Rogers) as a hacker — felt especially Black Mirror-esque.
However, true to the play’s comedic genre, and in keeping with the emphasis on fun seen in Midsummer Night Stream, Arden ultimately functions as a place of positivity. Waring’s reimagining of the play’s final scene as a Zoom call — the characters who had only met within Arden seeing each other for the first time — was especially joyous. With people around the world currently meeting through video games such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons while being unable to physically be with each other, Arden as a safe place online resonated strongly with our current locked down lives. By the end, the Black Mirror episode I was most reminded of was ‘San Junipero’ — a rare uplifting installment of the series which allows its characters a happily-ever-after ending within the titular computer-simulated realm.
Working under the limitations of Zoom, however, there is only so much of Waring’s version of Arden the production can show us. Screen sharing is used cleverly at points, with Rosalind and Celia creating their Arden avatars a particular highlight. But for much of the characters’ time in Arden, the audience witnessed them in the ‘real world’ — slumped on desk chairs, sofas or beds, the games console controllers in their hands the main reminder that they were interacting with each other as their Arden avatars and couldn’t ‘see’ each other on Zoom as we could. The convincing set-up of the opening Le Beau package and trailer clearly establishes Arden as a concept, but from that point Ctrl-Alt-Repeat mostly relied on the audience to use their own imaginations to bring Arden to life.
The main problem with this was the lack of clear distinction from the ‘real world’ segments, such as the opening act that took place at Court Games. Here, the characters did interact through Zoom in the world of the production, with the play’s wrestling match for example reimagined as an online video game competition between Orlando (Sid Phoenix) and Oliver (David Alwyn). Once we were in Arden, the set-up looked much the same thanks to the use of Zoom as the theatre space. The main reminder was the characters’ more relaxed appearances — Celia, for example, shifts from her fashion-conscious persona of the opening act to lounging in a Pikachu onesie with a pile of pizza boxes next to her. Despite their smart appearances and absent controllers during the final scene, I had to remind myself that the characters were no longer interacting through the video game world when the production shifted out of Arden again to conclude.
All of which brings me back to Waring’s suggestion of being ‘overambitious’. If there is any overambition, it’s purely in the director pushing the edges of what is currently possible in Lockdown Shakespeare. Simply put, Waring’s idea may be bigger than the constraints currently being put upon those working in the creative industries will allow her to make it. Ctrl-Alt-Repeat’s concept of Arden as an immersive role-playing realm is utterly inspired, to the point that I wondered why it has never (as far as I know) been attempted before. I would be first in line to see a big budget version of this As You Like It on the big or small screen, with Arden fully realised as the immersive video game environment I imagined it to be. In our current locked down moment, that is an impossibility. But with their second Shakespearean adaptation, Ctrl-Alt-Repeat have cemented themselves as pioneers of the Live Online Performance model of creating Shakespeare which has evolved since March.
Ctrl-Alt-Delete’s production of As You Like It is available to watch free of charge on YouTube here.
