Emma Rice’s production is an
all-singing, all-dancing, all-capering non-stop fun-fest. There’s just
one thing that might make it perfect: a bit of Shakespeare.
Yes, of course I’m being unkind, but as exaggerations go, it’s far from
wild. It takes ten minutes, an entirely new prologue and three
song-and-dance numbers before the first words from the play are
spoken... and they’re words from the end. Two and a half hours later,
the final song “The Rain It Raineth Every Day” is cut to three lines,
its bulk replaced by some more new stuff. Rice’s frequent Kneehigh
collaborator Carl Grose is credited with “additional text and lyrics”;
sometimes it feels as if it ought to be “additional material by William
Shakespeare”. Musical numbers abound (though hardly ever the ones
Shakespeare wrote), and gags are cut, inserted, updated even when
there’s no problem understanding them.
The most conspicuous instance of butchery is Feste. This sombre, clever
clown is, with his counterpart in
King
Lear, among the greatest fools in all of drama. Rice more or
less cuts him entirely. A few of his lines – but none of the material
which establishes his character and through him the ambivalent tone of
the entire play – are reassigned to Fabian, a figure far more
dispensable. Feste’s mock-priest scene and his name are given to the
bearded drag artist Le Gateau Chocolat (imagine Isaac Hayes in a
gold-sequinned dress... now try ever to forget that image), who is a
magnificent singer but fulfils no function whatever in the play except
to personify how it’s been farted about with.
On its own terms the production rollicks. Marc Antolin as Andrew
Aguecheek eclipses even the estimable Tony Jayawardena as Toby Belch,
and Katy Owen follows Tamsin Greig at the National as the second
impressive female Malvolio of 2017. (Several characters are now
gratuitously Scottish, so in contrast Owen exaggerates her own Welsh
accent.) But there could hardly be a production more calculated to
illustrate the reasons which led to the controversial decision that
this, Rice’s second year at the helm of this venue, is to be her last.
It’s as if she’s either never noticed or never heeded the first word of
its name.
Written for the Financial
Times.