Here shall he see no enemy But winter and rough weather

New Open Air Shakespeare drawing inspiration from Kent rural life in the 1950s.

Kent in the 1950s and Shakespeare may not appear to have much in common, but a new open air production of As You Like It by the Kent based Changeling Theatre draws its inspiration from this unlikely combination.

“The 1950s saw rapid change in the Kent countryside” explains the Changeling’s Artistic Director Rob Forknall. “There was huge demand for new homes and one solution was to tear up woodland to build housing estates.

“Take Park Wood in Maidstone” says Rob, “Today it’s a housing estate with a busy supermarket and petrol station, but in the 1950s it was simply a wood as it had been for centuries.

Tramps in the Woods

“My dad grew up there and remembers tramps living there. Some of them did casual labour like fruit picking, some of them built huts and shelters and slept in the woods during the summer.

“He remembers some amazing characters” says Rob, “like Singing Jack who lived in a hut in Park Wood which he built himself. Singing Jack had a big white beard and used to write his own songs and poems and perform them to earn money.

“Another character who lived rough in Park Wood at the time was known as The Captain. He wore a medal from the First World War and had a wooden hand. He said he’d made the hand himself from local wood.

“I think these people preferred the freedom of life on the open road to the constraints of urban living and civilisation. These ‘Gentlemen of the Road’ would move from village to village around Kent knocking on doors for a sandwich, a cup of tea or a cigarette. Usually people would help them out.

“In those days, when the welfare state barely existed, there was a whole way of life which has since disappeared”.

The Shakespeare Connection

But what’s it all got to do with Shakespeare?

“Well” says Rob, “When I was reading As You Like It, I was struck by the similarities.  Shakespeare was writing at a time when the English countryside was being rapidly transformed.  The royal forests were being privatised and cut down and common land enclosed and turned into fields for sheep.

“Today we know about deforestation and the loss of rain forest in the Amazon. But in 1600 much the same thing was happening in England.

“A whole way of life was being destroyed. Commoners and squatters who had lived in the woods for generations found their rights suddenly extinguished.  Little wonder there were riots against enclosure such as the 1596 uprisings in Kent.

Elizabethan Pastoral Nostalgia

“It gave rise to a wave of nostalgia for rural life. Playwrights such as Shakespeare found sympathetic audiences for pastoral themes praising the innocence and simplicity of old country ways and contrasting them with the corruption and artificiality of court life.

“It’s a key theme in As You Like It”, says Rob “A love of the countryside and freedom. Plus lots of larger than life characters and the idea that the forest is the last refuge of an ancient, less complex way of living. Or as Shakespeare put it;

Under the greenwood tree,
Who loves to lie with me,
And turn his merry note
Unto the sweet bird’s throat,
Come hither, come hither, come hither:
Here shall he see no enemy
But winter and rough weather.

“Singing Jack couldn’t have put it better” says Rob with a smile.