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'As You Like It' is one of Shakespeare鈥檚 most popular plays. With cross-dressing disguise, journeys into the woods, wrestling, live music, and some very wise words about love, this enchanting and romantic comedy will be the first Palace production of a Shakespeare since 1976.

All set to be a highlight of the Palace鈥檚 centenary year, this production was inspired by a photograph taken of the Palace during its 2002 renovation and imagines a production coming to life on the empty stage of an abandoned theatre.

The production is being directed by the Palace's Artistic Director Brigid Larmour and we caught up with her during rehearsals to find out more.听

'As You Like It' is a famous Shakespearean comedy but what's the story in a nutshell for those who maybe don't know it?

Brigid: In a nutshell - girl's father gets banished, girl meets boy, girl and boy fall in love, girl gets banished, boy gets banished, girl is diguised as a boy in order to be safe while she's escaping and then while she's dressed as a boy she meets the boy she fell in love with. She doesn't want to say who she is so they go through this whole complicated routine where she (as a he) pretends to teach him about love, but all the while there's this incredible chemistry between the two of them and I think in the end they don't really know what on earth's going on. They are just both madly besotted with one another and it causes incredible confusion about what's a boy and what's a girl and should I be saying this to you?

So it's fairly typical Shakespearean fayre then - confusion and cross-dressing?!

Brigid: Absolutely classic Shakespearean fayre! It's also got some classic Shakespearean characters. Rosalind, the central character, is a character that we all fall in love with in one way or another. And because she's dressed up as a young boy, she can be quite cheeky in ways that as a grown up girl she couldn't be. And she's always talking about love, saying things like "love is a kind of madness" and there are moments of recognition when the audience hears what she has to say. I suspect that women kind of identify with her and the men rather fall in love with her.

While Shakespeare's comedies have the humour, there are also a lot of universal themes in them. This has a lot of wise words to say about love and therefore there'll be a lot of recognition for the audience?

Brigid: I think so yes. And there's also a rather lovely scene between an old shepherd and a young shepherd, where the young shepherd, with all the arrogance of youth, thinks that the old shepherd can't possibly understand about love and the old shepherd of course knows more about love than he can even remember now that he is old.

You see the same kinds of questions about love and fidelity and how ghastly it is to be in love with the wrong person played out through all the different characters in different ways. Essentially it's a brilliant romantic comedy but because it's a Shakespeare play it's also extremely moving and full of insights about who we are and how we live, and it ends with a fantastic sense of community with a big dance and a great feeling of joy.

Then there's the wonderful character of Jacques who's the cynic, the wise observer of life who has the great speech about the seven ages of man which begins "All the world's a stage". He's there to make sure that things don't get too romantic or sentimental so there's always a balance of wit.

And this production is said to be inspired by a picture of the Watford Palace during the 2002 renovation?

Brigid: Yes. This photograph is very simple, it shows a theatre which is being restored so it's looking rather unloved. You can see the bare stage wall, rubble in the corner and a bit of an old carpet draped over a box and it just looks rather unloved and abandoned. That sometimes happens to old buildings, in particular theatres and I think it's very tragic when that happens. Fortunately here in Watford it didn't because the community rallied round to support the theatre.

But there's something rather magical about a theatre when it's empty and it's even more magical and slightly eerie when it's deserted and feels abandoned. Sometimes if you're working in a theatre and you go onto the stage late at night and you're the only person in the theatre, it has a special atmosphere that you can't describe where anything could happen. So I thought it would be interesting to imagine a theatre, not unlike this one, but instead of having been restored and loved and cherished, it had been allowed to just fall into neglect.

For example, there might be an old Victorian bit of painted scenery at the back and a little hamper of costumes, and what if an actress wandered into that theatre and felt the atmosphere of all the people who had been in the theatre before. And what if she heard a little bit of the music hall music and what if suddenly a play came to life in front of her and was in the Victorian period where this theatre was built - that's really the idea behind this production.

I think it really suits the play to have a production that isn't full of massive painted trees when you're supposed to be in the Forest of Arden. It's like the Globe Theatre where everything can happen very quickly. It's about the fluid movement of the actors on the stage and the actors persuading the audience that what they describe and imagine is actually happening.

The actual setting you've made for it is the late 19th century, is that to kind of fit in with the age of the theatre?

Brigid: It's the late 19th century which is slightly older than the theatre but yes, it's to fit in with that atmosphere and that style. But we made it a little earlier than the building of the theatre because central to the play is the idea of a girl who is frightened to go out into the world on her own when she is banished from court, and therefore dresses up as a boy because that makes her feel safer.

I think there is so much more equality for women now and the idea of putting trousers on isn't a particularly big deal, so we went before 1900, when women were wearing these extraordinary contraptions of whalebone and corsetry and had huge crinolines. I imagined that if you had to live in one of those, the idea of dressing up as a young boy would be so liberating. And of course, in those days women didn't have the vote and weren't allowed to own property in the same way that men were so there would have been a real freedom in dressing up.

And there's also live music which harks back to the theatre's origins as a music hall?

Brigid: Yes - I'm very lucky to have Dominic Muldowney, who is a composer in his own right as well as working in the theatre. He instantly understood when I said I was interested in two things. Firstly, there was the idea of music hall because the Palace was built as a music hall and that's what is in the rafters, bricks and woodwork here. And secondly, the play is set mostly in the country, the Forest of Arden, and that really evokes Shakespeare's own upbringing in Warwickshire. He was a country boy who moved to the city. He knew what the country was, so when he writes about shepherds they are not some kind of academic fantasy, they are people who don't have any food because they have an absentee landlord. He was very aware of people's real condition.

What Dominic has rather brilliantly done is create music which feels as though it has come out of an English folk tradition but there's also this other aspect which brings music hall into the theatre rather magically.听听听

This is the first time that the Palace has done its own production of a Shakespeare since 1976, isn't it?

Brigid: Yes - it's incredible to me really that our greatest author should have been so under represented. The thing that's brilliant about him is that he's this immensely intelligent man, highly intellectual and amazingly original, but the real thing about him is that he speaks to all of us in the room at the same time. If you do a Shakespeare play properly, which is what we're hoping to do, and do it with a kind of humility and really respond to the essence of what it is, it creates a feeling in the audience which is hard to describe. You're very moved by it, you're very uplifted by it and you're constantly hearing and seeing these things and thinking 'yes, that's how it is'. It's a mystery to me how one person can have had so much insight and crammed it all into a lifetime of all these great plays.听听听听听听

So people shouldn't be afraid of Shakespeare? It may have been written a long time ago but it speaks to everybody today?

Brigid: Absolutely. I spent five years at the National Theatre directing productions of Shakespeare in schools with practically no set and no barrier between the actors and the audience. To me it's all about the clarity and honesty and openness with which you play the language. If people don't understand what's happening in a scene, we're not doing our jobs right. That's the goal, we just want everybody to come with us on the story and have a great time!

As a director, when you agree to do a Shakespeare, how difficult is it, because they are plays that have been done before - is there a pressure to think up some new way of approaching it?

Brigid: I think the important thing is not to overlay the play with some kind of gimmick. Very often when you see a production of Shakespeare you see a sort of gimmick pressed on top of the play, so you are trying to look at two things in parallel i.e. what the play really is and what the clever idea really is.

What I try and do is spend a lot of time with the text, saying the words, hearing them in my head and hearing what they feel like when I say them. I try to get a sense of who the characters really are and what kind of actor would be really good at playing that character. And then I construct a world outward from that.

In this play, because there's an issue of a girl being banished from a court and having to dress up as a boy in order to feel safe, it felt important to go pre-20th century because those things are very far from our world. But I also felt that if we went all the way back to 1599 that's just a bit too far because a lot of people have problems with men in tights!

Also, I think there are ways in which a slightly more modern setting for it can reveal things to people about the play that they will understand as being closer to their own world than they thought.

But the play happens on a stage, it happens because all of us together in an evening in Watford decide to agree that all these people standing up there are these characters in this world. So, what I try and do as a director, working with the designer and the rest of the creative team, is to create a make believe world that people will buy into and which serves the story. I think it's just trying to find the right balance for each particular production of each play and that also has to do with what's going on in the world outside.

So it's finding a truth that everybody can relate to?

Brigid: Yes - but you don't want to bang people over the head. Audiences are intelligent people, they don't need you to underline parallels in red ink three times for them to understand a Shakespeare play!