Imagining Arden: Audience responses to place and participation at Taking Flight Theatre Company’s As You Like It

Abstract

This article looks at audience responses to Taking Flight Theatre Company’s outdoor, promenade production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which took place in Wales and the South West of England in July 2014. It draws on qualitative ethnographic research gathered through observations and semi-structured interviews, conducted face-to-face and in-situ with audience members immediately before and after the theatrical performances. In what follows, I consider how audience members responded to following the performers ‘off the beaten track’ and walking along real dirt paths in three different city parks. What I found was that, across the three different venues, audiences suggested that journeying through the parks with the performers facilitated an imaginative response to Shakespeare’s iconic Forest of Arden as what Michael Saler terms a ‘geography of imagination’ (2012: 67), more than it revealed stories of the parks’ own histories and geographical locales. Two common responses to the walking aspect of the production included a sense of the parks temporarily coming to stand in for an imaginary Arden, as well as a sense that audience members felt ‘part of’ the performance and, thus, a part of the Shakespearean imaginary world. The forest world of the play, they suggested, supplanted the ‘primary World’ geography of the actual parks with the imaginary ‘secondary world’ geography of Shakespeare’s famously imagined and reimagined Arden (Tolkien in Wolf 2012: 23). How did Taking Flight’s performance interventions work with, or against, the parks’ geographies to affect how individuals imagined the world of the play? What might the reception of Taking Flight’s performance tell us about imagined worlds presented in real places where the make-believe and the everyday rub up against one another? And under what circumstances might the reception of an imaginary ‘Arden’ signal something more productive than an indiscriminate erasure of local specificity? I will suggest that imagining Arden at Taking Flight’s As You Like It took the form of an ongoing process of ‘writing over’ the primary worlds of the parks, which carried on, humdrum, alongside the performances. The mobile staging and interactive exposition of the piece simultaneously challenged its audiences to extend potentially limiting conceptions of the imaginary world of Arden.