TWELFTH NIGHT
Courtyard
Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
Opened 5 September, 2007
***
John Lithgow may be best known for the sitcom Third Rock From The Sun, but he can
blend over-the-top comedy with unhinged menace as in Brian De Palma's
self-parodic movie Raising Cain.
Curious, then, that in Twelfth Night
with its rich potential for evoking darker undercurrents, director Neil
Bartlett makes virtually no use of this dimension in his actor.
Lithgow's steward Malvolio, when imprisoned as a madman in Act Four,
plays his distress sincerely but not shatteringly; his final line,
"I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you," is given the purest
reading of utter ruination I can recall. Mostly, though, his
characterisation suggests a raft of mid-20th-century English comic
character actors, principally Dennis Price and Charles Lloyd Pack, as
he patrols the lady Olivia's household with exaggeratedly measured
tread, looking as if he is trying to locate where the smell is coming
from. When, having found a letter tricking him into believing Olivia
loves him, he practises smiling, Lithgow does not overplay the
grimacing as much as many actors, but for one incredible moment
resembles a distressed coelacanth.
However, Lithgow's Hollywood cachet is not the primary focus of
Bartlett's production. As one of Britain's most accomplished and
thoughtful Queer directors, he wrings new twists out of the sexual
disequilibrium of the play. Setting it in Edwardian period (with
mutton-chop whiskers aplenty), he casts young male actor Chris New as
Viola, the protagonist who disguises herself as a boy. After the
ringlets and gown of his first scene are disposed of, New makes little
or no attempt to play femininity as such; rather, he is to all intents
and purposes a tentative young gay man, trying to cope with his secret
love for the prissily self-indulgent Count Orsino and genuinely pitying
Justine Mitchell's Olivia when she professes a love he cannot return.
New's performance is simple and affecting. Conversely, Viola's
identical twin brother Sebastian scarcely notices when sea-captain
Antonio displays his own affections. In a further twist, Orsino and
Antonio are played by strikingly similar-looking brothers Jason and
Simon Merrells, so that in these pairings we see differing images of
the same faces in various permutations of love that dare not speak its
name. (It must be said, though, that in stressing the play's
image/reality theme, Bartlett seriously overdoes the stage business
with assorted mirrors.)
Contrast New's naturalness with the artificially hearty renditions of
Toby Belch, Andrew Aguecheek and Fabian, played by Marjorie Yates,
Annabel Leventon and Joanne Howarth as music-hall "drag kings" of a
century or so ago. This works altogether less well, partly because
overplayed Shakespearean comedy is always deadly, but also because
there is no corresponding romantic or sexual tension to inform the
dynamic. Toby and Andrew share one brief drunken dance, and Toby's
attachment to housekeeper Maria (played here by Siobhan Redmond as a
prim Highland spinster) lacks any erotic charge. The opening scenes
also felt under-rehearsed: several actors muffed their line cues on
press night, either anticipating them or leaving too-long pauses which,
if intended, are incomprehensible: just "dead air".
Apart from Messrs New and (as far as he goes) Lithgow, the success of
the evening is James Clyde as Feste. It is all but impossible nowadays
to avoid the dark and embittered side of this jester, but Clyde excels,
bringing to the character the same mixture of irreverence and nihilism
that imbued his Spike Milligan in Roy Smiles' play Ying Tong three years ago. As he
orchestrates the proceedings with infernal supper-lounge flourishes at
a grand piano, we grasp Feste's jaded loathing of all around him for
listening to his silly riffs and of himself for peddling them. For this
Feste, the rain it most decidedly raineth every day. The outlook for
Illyria as a whole: changeable.
Written for the Financial
Times.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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