The music is by Michel Sanvoisin and the film stars James Fox as Jacques, plus Cyril Cusack, Andrew Tiernan, Celia Bannerman, Emma Croft as Rosalind, Griff Rhys Jones as Touchstone, Roger Hammond, Don Henderson and Miriam Margolyes.

In her version of As You Like It, set in an urban wasteland, "the weather is never kind", and the exiled live in tents and cardboard boxes reminiscent of the scenes of homelessness which characterised Britain when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister.

[4] Relocating Shakespeare's original comedy to the corporate world of London, whose "blighted docklands" are a "trenchant condemnation of Thatcher's Britain", continues the engagement with "social malfeance and urban ills" that characterised the director's earlier films Little Dorrit (1987) and The Fool (1990).

In addition to its small and collaborative production team and non-commercial aims, As You Like It is an experimental, unconventional and challenging work which deliberately uses relocations in time and place to create a unique reproduction of Shakespeare's original play.

Like Edzard's version of Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit, this project uses the city as a metaphor, explores the complexities of double perspectives and focuses on societies at work.

The relocation brings the two worlds of the 1590s and 1990s together through a shared vision of "national blight", corruption, and a shabby shallowness, in both of which the existence of and reaction to "buskers, beggars and...squatters" were familiar.