As You Like It: A Radical Retelling, Edinburgh International Festival 2025 review - breathtakingly audacious, deeply shocking

There is, let’s be honest, a certain self-congratulatory self-satisfaction among some particularly well-heeled sections of the Edinburgh International Festival audience, event-goers who’ve forked out a fortune to be fed high culture carefully curated for them, and who either reside in some of the city’s most well-off districts or have perhaps travelled hundreds, even thousands of miles for the pleasure.

Heck, a group in front of me even were even discussing the merits of the city’s various private members’ clubs, and the intricate exclusionary processes for admission, while waiting for their evening entertainment – apparently a ‘radical retelling’ of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy – to begin.

Except this wasn’t quite going to be Shakespeare as anyone was expecting it. Instead, South Dakota-born, Toronto-raised actor Cliff Cardinal appeared sheepishly from behind the stage’s red curtain to deliver a land acknowledgement. Were we all aware of what that was? He’d explain anyway, in case anyone wasn’t up to speed: an acknowledgement of the earlier residents and custodians of the land upon which the show had been created, now commonplace in certain more liberally minded establishments in Australia and North America. Except… who was that land acknowledgement really serving? As a man from the Lakota nation, born in the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, how did Cardinal feel about giving what was essentially white people’s acknowledgement of the appropriation of land from groups to which he belonged? And what did he think about that kind of support from non-indigenous ‘allies’, and the purposes it served?

And from there, As You Like It: A Radical Retelling spiralled increasingly venomously into questions of imperialism and colonialism, privilege and deprivation, as what was apparently going to be the show’s real content slipped further into the distance. ‘Where’s the Shakespeare?’ came an exasperated cry from the back of Morningside’s Church Hill Theatre. Cardinal responded with a wicked grin and an admission that he’d never even read As You Like It, pulling back the red curtains to reveal – nothing. Well, just a random collection of tech equipment on an empty stage. ‘I lied to you, and I took your money,’ he admitted gleefully. There was never going to be any Shakespeare at all.

As settlers had stolen indigenous lands from their earlier peoples, so he had stolen our time in an act of reverse colonisation. How did it feel? Cardinal’s central ruse – he begs the audience not to give the game away, but we’ll press ahead since the show’s short International Festival run has ended – is blunt and brutal, but it’s powerfully effective, bringing a privileged Edinburgh audience up close to the lived experiences of being lied to and exploited. (Yes, there were numerous walk-outs – though for anyone seriously furious, Cardinal explained, he’d be happy to refund their ticket money.) And as such, it’s a bold, deeply provocative show for the International Festival to put on so near its close, and – surely significantly – in a small theatre in one of the city’s most well-to-do areas.

Not everything works. Some of Cardinal’s specifics get lost in translation between North America and Scotland, sometimes because Europeans (specifically Brits) shamefully know next to nothing about our forebears’ involvement in colonial exploitation, but sometimes because we’re simply not clued up on cultural figures more familiar to Canadian audiences. Some of his wider leaps in logic leave his central thread difficult to follow. There’s an argument, too, that the show might have been modified slightly to spotlight the more distant relationship we have with imperialism – and, let’s face it, the wealth and privilege it’s brought us, so that decades down the line an event like the Edinburgh International Festival can even exist (as Cardinal himself pointed out). But Cardinal’s longer, angrier closing section on Canadian church residential schools, and the murder of thousands of children stolen from their families (whose mass graves are still being discovered), ensures a far darker, more universal relevance, one whose very humanity transcends international boundaries.

But As You Like It: A Radical Retelling is a breathtakingly audacious, deeply shocking work of righteous fury, delivered with Cardinal’s witty, slippery charisma that keeps its audience perpetually on their toes. Its unapologetic determination to say difficult things and shine a searing light of accusation straight at its audience might shock and offend many – including, perhaps, those more used to the genteel discussions of Edinburgh private members’ clubs. But its scream of anguish and rage nonetheless demands to be heard.

• Run ended

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