As you like it

Castle Yard at Kilkenny Design Ends Sun Fri/Sat 7.30pm, Sun 6pm/8pm €25/€22 kilkennyarts.ie

Although they may leave under duress, the characters banished from court into the Forest of Ardenne quickly discover the pleasures of life outdoors. It’s a similar deal for the audience of this production from Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, the centrepiece of the winding down Kilkenny Arts Festival, which spills its music and mirth from a recreated Elizabethan “booth stage” (essentially a wooden crate with a small apron) into the open air of the Castle Yard of Kilkenny Design.

Performing Shakepeare al fresco is an almost dutiful summer habit, but director James Dacre is more sensitive to the material and its context, treating the text with great contemporary clarity, the humour with broad strokes, and the slippery identity of people and places with intelligence. Disguised as a man, Deirdre Mullins’s arrestingly spirited Rosalind assists her would-be lover Orlando with his seduction technique.

Dacre’s production won’t emphasise such sexually subversive elements, but there is another sense of double agency, where France blurs into England and Jaques, the sour malcontent, is transformed into a woman.

Accustomed to a greater range of alternative performances, regular visitors may find it a pity that the festival’s theatre strand has put all its eggs into just one popular basket. Still, there’s no doubting how well it is wrought.

Can't see that? Catch this:Much Ado About Nothing, Project Arts Centre, Dublin