The Heart of Robin Hood

The last time I made a pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon I found the glorious "Matilda". Trekking to "The Heart of Robin Hood", this year's Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) seasonal offering, seemed like a similarly safe bet. As it turns out Robin probably deserves a West End transfer too.

That said, it won't, as the production wouldn't fit in any West End Theatre I can think of. The staging uses the full resources of the new RSC theatre, a hugely vertical design, which will come as a surprise to no one who knows Gisli Örn Garðarsson's previous work with his own company "Vesturport". The set also includes one of the coolest on stage entrances I can recall. The RSC theatre has a large thrust stage and has here gained an enormous, steep sloping wall at the non-audience end that provides copious excuses for both scaling and sliding down at tremendous speed. The set also features a pond that must be the most abused pool of water I've ever seen: people and objects coming in and out of it seemingly ever couple of minutes.

The stagecraft then is superlative but this is not just smoke and mirrors. David Farr has put together an original take on the Robin Hood legend that places Maid Marion at its core. Robin becomes a young, headstrong man who is stealing for himself and the play depicts him being taught the ways of the world by Marion and her jester Pierre (and predictably falling in love too). The standard villainy appears in the form of Prince John and no one will be disappointed by the way the merry men are portrayed but the more overblown, macho elements are generally played down. A quasi-feminist take if you will on a fairly boy centric legend. There's a very real sense of danger however, and being the RSC there's significant violence including a decapitation and a rather nasty tongue slicing scene.

The cast look like they're having an absolute ball as the slide, leap and fly about the auditorium. Iris Roberts has just the right amount of steel as the tomboy Marion, she's elegant enough to be believable as the most beautiful woman in England but has enough edge to pass for one of the boys. She's assisted by the marvellously foppish, Ólafur Darri Ólafsson who prances about the stage to the delight of everyone. There was a risk here that Robin himself would become rather dislikable, he's headstrong and pretty rude, but James McArdle does fine work making him seem juvenile rather than vile. On the truly vile front Martin Hutson and Tim Treloar double team as the villains, Treloar's Gisborne of the particularly nasty variety.

A thrilling bit of theatre that sets the heart beat going with phenomenally visceral stagecraft before capturing it with a well told, heartfelt yarn. Now finished, I fear never to return, but for those who caught it, "The Heart of Robin Hood" will long in the memory.

(Review of Performance on Thursday, January 5th, 2012 at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon)