As You Like It A Radical Retelling, EIF Theatre review - 'greeted with whoops of glee by fans in the audience'

As You Like It A Radical Retelling ★★★★☆

Church Hill Theatre, until 23 August

“I lied to you, and I took your money,” says Cliff Cardinal, towards the end of this fierce shocker of a show; adding that that experience should help us understand how it feels to be an indigenous person in North America.

Born into the Lakota nation in the United States – but raised in Canada – Cardinal is an angry man; and in his 100-minute show As You Like It A Radical Retelling, he performs a charismatic and aggressive act of counter-expropriation, using a Shakespearean title to lure a white bourgeois audience into the theatre, and then delivering a sustained litany of rage against the brutal colonising and exploitation of indigenous lands and people on which most of the wealth of the western world is founded.

So as the show starts, Cardinal appears behind traditional footlights, in front of a red curtain, to deliver the “land acknowledgement” with which liberally-minded theatres in Australia and North America now generally begin their performances.

READ MORE: Edinburgh International Festival theatre review: Cutting The Tightrope

This is the bit, he explains, where western liberals acknowledge that they stole the land on which they live and work, but do not give it back. And from there on, in a “land acknowledgment” that consumes the whole show, Cardinal leads us on a searing tragicomic journey through the impacts of imperialism and colonialism, right down to the grim specifics of the treatment of native north Americans in Canada, where the graves of indigenous children taken from their families to die in church boarding schools are still being discovered today.

Some of Cardinal’s political and comedic assumptions don’t quite work under urban British conditions. Our cities are more like distant beneficiaries of colonial land theft than direct examples of it; and liberals here do not do land acknowledgments.

None of this, though, really diminishes the force of Cardinal’s central argument, greeted with whoops of glee by fans in the audience. And while those angered by the ruse at the centre of Cardinal’s show can always go to the box office and ask for their money back, the millions duped or robbed of their birthright over centuries have not been so lucky; and thereby, finally, hangs the tale.

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