Michelle Terry is excellent as Helena, making sense of an almost impossible part and giving real feeling to this strange heroine; making her gawky and unattractive physically, yet emotionally admirable and appealing, is something she seems to achieve with ease and with excellent diction. Clare Higgins is outstanding as the Countess of Rossillion, one of the rare mothers-in-law in literature, and possibly in life, who is loving, wise and good, without being boring. In an equally strong performance as the king, Oliver Ford Davies does everything to hold together an otherwise rather inconsistent cast.

The mood music, however, was often an irritant, apart from a triumphant moment at the cleverly bleak ending. Imposing mood music on Shakespeare productions (other than his own songs) seems to be a new convention. It is not just unnecessary, it is offensively manipulative and a particularly contemporary annoyance. In the Globe's As You Like It, too, the distracting noise of musical promptings strikes up from time to time — here comes the seriously romantic bit — as though, given the current mass addiction to surround-sound, the many stimuli of theatre were not enough for a contemporary audience. 

Otherwise, As You Like It was a dream, in both senses — a dream of youth and desire set free for a time in a magic wood, and a dream of a production, full of youthful energy, agility and beauty, with very lovely singing of Shakespeare's heart-stopping songs, an excellent Jacques and a particularly good Touchstone.

Dick Bird's and Caroline Hughes's costumes were rigorously in period, and very beautiful; so was the body language. In the beginning, when at court, Rosalind and Celia stand very chastely and rigidly, according to the convention of the times, with their hands folded modestly across their stomachers. This gives much greater meaning to the freedom they find in the forest of Arden, not only emotionally but also physically. It also perhaps gives more understanding to a 21st-century audience of some of the constraints of 16th-century society, without taking away from the universality of the play.

What's more, it all proves that the starkest of sets and the minimum of props can fire the imagination, even with an almost archaic text. Equally, sexing Shakespeare up, though often successful, can sometimes be rather pointless and crude, as in the comic parts of the Old Vic's current Winter's Tale, in which rudely-shaped balloons are used, embarrassingly, to suggest bucolic bawdry.

The Globe and National productions, however, make the most of their chosen constraints and freedoms. The usual reconciliation scene at the end of Shakespeare's comedies ends in this All's Well in a magnificent lack of an ending, with a sudden freeze frame of the young couple caught in fear and uncertainty. By contrast, the jig at the end of As You Like It, just before Rosalind's epilogue — with all the cast stomping enthusiastically in the golden evening light — was a moment of joy.