Their hearts’ delight

Perhaps because it’s set in a world of hunger and homelessness, corruption and outright tyranny, all the comic love-play in “As You Like It” becomes deeply, unexpectedly touching: evidence of the rebirth -- against all odds -- of the best in human nature.

Peter Hall’s Theatre Royal Bath staging softens and stylizes the extremes in the play, giving us, for instance, a gauzy projected forest in which the blood-ritual of the deer hunt simply doesn’t belong. But Monday at the Ahmanson Theatre -- opening night of a seven-week run -- a production set in no particular era renewed the text in ways both surprising and profound.

From 1999 to 2001, Ahmanson audiences saw Hall work with American actors on Shakespeare and get no further than dutiful, bottom-line verse-speaking. His productions often had no sense of interpretive freedom, no narrative drive, no pulse -- everything that Hall’s “As You Like It” supplies and glories in. For his trust in the text is here repaid by a cast of Brits able to seize the words and shake them for new feelings, clues to character, ways of taking a classic into its fifth century.

When you hear Michael Siberry as a distinctively venal Touchstone bite into a line and pull fresh insights from the most arcane jokes of 1599, or find Rebecca Hall (the director’s daughter) dissolving in laughter and delivering all those famous sayings that we learned in high school as if she’s making them up on the spot, you know you’re in the right place.

As designed by John Gunter, the militaristic nastiness of Duke Frederick’s court may be a mite overstated -- along with the fact that Rosalind and Celia look a lot less comfortable in their dowdy floor-length, high-necked, long-sleeved gowns than the looser, more personalized garments they wear in the forest.

OK, but something more original is going on here than the off-the-rack Shakespearean insight that the natural world frees us to be ourselves. No, Hall’s staging avoids hammering home that truism and focuses instead on how the overwhelming, inarticulate longing that oppresses and paralyzes Rosalind and Orlando at their first meeting becomes defined and eventually manageable through their school-of-love by-play in the forest. In short, these beautiful young people learn how to express their love for one another, how to have a future together, and we watch the process as if for the first time.

Whether she’s gowned or in male drag, something in Rebecca Hall’s tone of voice muffles too many of her speeches, but her finest moments brilliantly reconcile Rosalind’s lovesickness and her nonstop verbal acuity. Jokes that can seem to be at everyone else’s expense turn inward here -- still witty but newly defanged -- and her sensitivity to every impulse of Dan Stevens’ Orlando and Rebecca Callard’s Celia makes their scenes with her well-nigh miraculous.

Stevens starts strong and grows stronger, able to be rebellious and likable, sappy and attractive at the same time -- though we’re not sure what he’s feeling when his new pal Ganymede suddenly grows very, very serious in their whimsical wooing games. Does he think that Ganymede is gay? Is he attracted to the boy? It would be nice to know....

With Hall’s Rosalind always exuding maximum vulnerability, Callard can’t remain just a foil, and the more she takes charge of the relationship, the more you notice her unerring comic flair. She has plenty of competition: Charlotte Parry’s fabulously devious Phoebe, for instance, and Janet Greaves’ wondrously unsquelchable Audrey.

The small company offers a number of actors in dual roles. Most notably, David Barnaby embodies different facts of age and experience as the servant Adam and the shepherd Corin, while James Laurenson artfully plays both the usurping duke and his brother, the banished duke -- with one transformation quick enough to make you wonder how it’s done.

The cynical Jaques, however, is a singular problem, though Philip Voss has all the skill and authority needed for the assignment. Hall puts him in a spotlight for the seven ages of man speech, but treating it as an aria and Voss as a guest star does the play no favors.

Something crucial eludes both of them. On this same stage in 1968, David Jones’ Royal Shakespeare Company staging made the whole play a war between Jaques’ fatal soul-sick- ness and Rosalind’s life-affirming energy. Their one meeting (Alan Howard versus Dorothy Tutin) became the crux of the play; here it’s just another brief, weightless clash of forest incompatibles.

Because “As You Like It” is a comedy, Shakespeare abruptly supplies a happy ending at the last minute: a dozen lines spoken by a character we’ve never seen. It’s deliberately preposterous -- a playwright’s trick intended to remind us that life doesn’t work this way, that the problems caused by dangerous, capricious tyrants don’t magically disappear except in fiction.

Should we live under evil as best we can or run from it and our place in the world? Is love still possible and how can we ever trust and cherish it? Questions such as these make this the most searching of Shakespeare’s romantic comedies, and, despite its flaws, Hall’s staging lets the thematic resonances loom as large as the laughter.

It’s no accident that the play is a classic. People learn to know themselves, brothers are reconciled, injustice crumbles, multiple weddings inspire joyous song, winter gives way to spring, and we emerge cleansed and ready for new life. What more could we want from the theater?

*

‘As You Like It’

Where: Ahmanson Theatre, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown L.A.

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays to Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays. Also 7:30 p.m. Feb. 13 and 27, March 13 and 27, 2 p.m. Feb. 17, March 3 and 17

Ends: March 27

Price: $20 to $75

Contact: (213) 628-2772

Running Time: 3 hours, 15 minutes

Rebecca Hall...Rosalind

Dan Stevens...Orlando

Rebecca Callard...Celia

Michael Siberry...Touchstone

Philip Voss...Jaques

Carlotte Parry...Phoebe

David Birkin...Silvius

Janet Greaves...Audrey

James Laurenson...The Banished

Duke, the Usurping Duke

James Crossley...Charles, William

A Theatre Royal Bath production. By William Shakespeare. Directed by Peter Hall. Designer John Gunter. Lighting and production designer Peter Mumford. Composer Mick Sands. Sound designer Gregory Clarke. Associate director Trish Rigdon. Production stage manager John McNamara.