Authors: William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night (21 page)
In 1987 Kenneth Branagh directed the Renaissance Theatre Company’s production at the Riverside Studios. It was set in a wintry landscape with a Christmas tree and a snowy cemetery. Richard
Briers’ “first-rate” Malvolio was “nicely balanced by Anton Lesser’s shaggy-locked Feste, Frances Barber’s clear-spoken Viola, and Caroline Langrishe’s Olivia.”
31
The production was later re-created for television. In the same year Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl played at the Donmar Warehouse after a lengthy provincial tour. It was a controversial and irreverent production, with the drunken revelers blasting out the Sinatra classic “My Way.” Michael Ratcliffe in the
Observer
thought it “a
Twelfth Night
for those who had never seen the play before and those who thought they never wanted to see it again,” whereas Peter Kemp in the
Independent
argued that “Self-indulgence—mocked in
Twelfth Night
—is pandered to in this production.”
32
Tim Supple’s 1998 production at the Young Vic contrived to be both “visually simple, its costumes vaguely suggesting an Eastern exoticism, and aurally rich, the alien beauty of its Eastern melodies and instruments creating an Illyria of otherness and wonder.”
33
For his final season in 2002–03 at the Donmar Warehouse, Sam Mendes staged the play in repertory with Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
. With Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio, Emily Watson as Viola, and David Bradley as Aguecheek, it was “a production that found multiple dimensions of
Twelfth Night
with highly suggestive staging and music and a minimum of detail.”
34
Twelfth Night
has been set everywhere and nowhere: in 2000 Shakespeare and Company set it “against fragments of a deteriorating seaside carnival”; in the same year the Theatre at Monmouth’s production was set in “a 1920s seaside resort,” while the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s production of that year created a “1930s cabaret mood.” On the other hand, companies such as the “touring five-person troupe Actors From the London Stage, thrive on early modern practices such as open spaces and doubling, tripling, and quadrupling roles. In the 1994 performance … at the Clemson Shakespeare Festival, Geoffrey Church played Orsino, Feste, and Fabian.”
35
Similarly, Shenandoah Shakespeare’s productions in 1995 and 2000–01 successfully experimented with cross-gender cross-casting, with David McCallum playing both Maria and Sebastian. The 2002 all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London played with the sexual ambiguity of the casting, causing
the audience to gasp as Orsino kissed Cesario. Mark Rylance found a great deal of unsuspected comedy in the part of Olivia, and Paul Chahidi was a wonderfully busy Maria. The production was especially successful when played in the hall of the Middle Temple, where Manningham had seen the original version exactly four hundred years before.
The play has continued in recent years to thrive onstage despite Michael Billington’s contention that while “
Twelfth Night
may be Shakespeare’s most perfect comedy, it is also one of the hardest to bring off in the theater because of its sheer kaleidoscopic range of moods.”
36
The illusionist productions of the nineteenth century are a thing of the past, their place taken by film with all its potential for realism. There were a number of silent screen versions, including Charles Kent’s for Vitagraph in 1910, which, despite lasting for only twelve minutes, employs relatively sophisticated cinematographic techniques.
37
In 1955 Yakov Fried produced a Russian-language version in black and white which critics have seen as a response to the death of Stalin in its “fresh air of political renewal” which “opens up Shakespeare’s play into a world of expansive great houses and the rich, open landscape of faraway mountains, open fields, and the promise of unlimited vistas or reverberate hills.”
38
In 1937 the BBC broadcast a live excerpt of the play, the first known instance of a work of Shakespeare being performed on television, which featured a young Greer Garson. A 1939 television production of the entire play directed by Michel Saint-Denis starred Peggy Ashcroft as Viola and George Devine as Sir Toby. In 1970 John Dexter and John Sichel produced a version for television with Ralph Richardson as Sir Toby, Alec Guinness as Malvolio, and Tommy Steele as a youthful Feste, with Joan Plowright playing both Viola and Sebastian. Two years later Ron Wertheim’s Playboy production was made: “As one might expect, the language of the play is ruthlessly cut to accommodate numerous and oddly innocent examples of Illyrian erotic revelry, rich in nudity, pastoral landscapes, soft-focus camerawork, and slow motion.”
39
The BBC’s 1980 version is generally regarded as more successful, “graced with spirited performances by Felicity Kendall as Viola and Sinead Cusack as Olivia,” with Alec McCowen as Malvolio and Robert Hardy as Sir Toby.
It nevertheless “still suffered to some extent under the weight of canonical seriousness,” and Ford notes: “There was a strange echo of the detailed, illusionistic settings of Beerbohm Tree.”
40
Trevor Nunn, who surprisingly had never directed the play on stage in his distinguished theatrical career, directed a successful film version in 1996. It was set in the nineteenth century and boasted a star-studded cast, with Imogen Stubbs as Viola, Helena Bonham-Carter as Olivia, Toby Stephens as Orsino, Mel Smith as Sir Toby, Richard E. Grant as Sir Andrew, Ben Kingsley as Feste, Imelda Staunton as Maria, and Nigel Hawthorne as Malvolio. The film opens by “inventing a kind of mock prologue that depicts the sinking of the ship and the rescue of Viola.”
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Ford argues that “Nunn’s emphasis on song and music … allow his film to capture some of the aural energies of the play without compromising the film.” Nunn successfully exploits filmic technique: “In one wonderful moment early in the film, Nunn uses the camera to capture the complex energies swirling within Viola. We see her in disguise, walking along the sea, determined to master her manly walk in a state of mind both resourceful and ironic.”
42
There were ironic references to
Twelfth Night
in John Madden’s 1998 film
Shakespeare in Love
in which Gwyneth Paltrow played a young noblewoman called Viola who disguises herself as a boy in order to become an actor. In 2003 Tim Supple directed an updated version for television with Parminder Nagra as Viola, David Troughton as Sir Toby, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Orsino, and Michael Maloney as Malvolio. A Channel 4 documentary charted the course of production—
21st Century Bard: The Making of Twelfth Night
. In 2006 a contemporary teenage update called
She’s the Man
, directed by Andy Fickman and starring Amanda Hynes, set the play in a prep school called Illyria.
Laughter in Illyria?
Twelfth Night
is often referred to as Shakespeare’s most melancholy or darkest comedy, and surely unrequited love and grief are not what you’d instantly think of as the basis for laughter. Nevertheless, the
most painful of emotions are often the catalyst for the most beautiful of poetry. Writing about tragedy, Shelley believed, “The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself.”
43
Shakespeare’s genius in
Twelfth Night
is to take the pleasure that we feel from tragedy and successfully combine it with farce to create a hauntingly bittersweet comedy. The effect on the audience is to have them on the verge of tears or laughter at any given moment. In doing so he has created the most potent mixture of pleasures derived from the light and dark sides of literature.
The director of a production of
Twelfth Night
has to make decisions about whether his or her production will attempt to balance the elements of light and dark in the play, or to go to one extreme or the other. Productions by the RSC demonstrate a wide variety of approaches, and the difficulty in succeeding with this emotionally complex play is shown in its reviews. Directors have invariably been criticized for omitting comedy, neglecting depth of emotion, or failing to find a balance between the two.
From the 1960s onward a definite shift took place in which the darker elements became the central focus—aspects such as the treatment of madness, sexuality, and the character of Feste were radically reexamined, altering the tone of the play:
Twelfth Night
is widely accepted as a supreme harmonizing of the romantic and the comic, sweet and the astringent. The admirable production, then, is held to be one which holds these elements in balance. It is in the inflection which a production gives to
Twelfth Night
that the special interest lies. And this inflection has undoubtedly modulated in recent years. Broadly, and crudely:
Twelfth Night
used to be funny, and is now much less so. What has happened?
44
John Barton’s 1969 staging is widely considered a landmark production because it was markedly different in tone from previous productions. His exploration of the psychological complexity of the characters created for one critic “the most austere
Twelfth Night
I have seen”;
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for another it was suffused with “a kind of wintry melancholy.”
46
The program notes pointed to this darker reading:
For some characters [Orsino, Viola, Olivia, and Sebastian] … holiday perpetuates itself … The other characters of the comedy, by contrast, are exiled into reality. For most of them, holiday is paid for in ways that have real life consequences … None of these characters can be absorbed into the harmony of the romantic plot. For the rest of us … the play is done and we return to normality along with Sir Toby, Aguecheek and Malvolio … we have been dismissed to a world beyond holiday, where “the rain it raineth every day.”
47
Barton’s production effectively used the sound of the sea to bring in what Matthew Arnold in his great Victorian poem of loss, “Dover Beach,” called “the eternal note of sadness”:
The audience takes its seats to find Richard Pasco’s Orsino listening to his musicians. Presently an aural disturbance comes upon the music. It grows louder, and is identified as the sound of the sea crashing upon the shore.
48
Thus Orsino’s longing for love is overlaid with the storm that heralds Viola’s arrival, prompting, through the use of sound, the idea that she will awaken him from romantic delusion to reality and true love. The sound recurred during Viola’s conversation with Orsino in Act 2 scene 4 and during her reunion with Sebastian.
49
Viola acts as a catalyst, a storm of honest emotion: “throughout the play, the sea still tosses its waves: there are moments when the setting reminded me of the tunnel of a dream, a journeying place of the mind.”
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Critic Robert Speaight experienced a sense of “the howling of the gale outside the gilded cage of Orsino’s palace; reality at odds with romanticism.”
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Even the comic characters were serious: “The knightly revels are sad too. Barrie Ingham’s Sir Andrew is a knight of woeful countenance”:
52
Most startling and persuasive of the group is Elizabeth Spriggs, Maria: no longer the usual bundle of fun, but a prim Edinburgh
housekeeper in gold rimmed spectacles, besotted with Sir Toby and only mounting the Malvolio intrigue with the purpose of luring him into marriage … the essence of the reading appears after the carousel scene where she steals back hoping to catch Sir Toby alone, only to be packed off blubbering by the selfish old brute (“It is too late to go to bed”) … Malvolio: the agent of so much fear in the household, and finally the most wounded member of all—broken double under the weight of his humiliation, [stumbled] off stage after handing Olivia his chain of office. It is not a happy household.
53
In John Caird’s 1983 production inherent melancholy resulted from the pain of love. The program, instead of the usual notes, was littered with Shakespeare’s sonnets on unrequited and barren love: “Set in the Jacobean period, the production accentuated a sense of decay and confinement by employing a ruined garden, rusting gates, and a mortuary chapel as components of the set design.”
54
Thunder rumbled in the background, only achieving downpour at the end of the play, cued by Feste’s song. The impact of frustrated love and thoughts of mortality on Viola’s psyche was demonstrated by an inspired bit of acting from Zoë Wanamaker:
the decisive moment in [her] performance as Viola came when reunited with Sebastian, she showed her deep fear that her drowned brother had returned as a ghost to frighten her. She had suffered enough already, and now, on top of everything, the spirit world was playing an unforgivable trick, trifling inexcusably with her deepest feelings of loss and grief.
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In recent years there has been a definite reaction against the “twentieth-century preoccupation with the play’s melancholy.”
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Ian Judge’s 1994 production played “the broad comedy to the hilt.”
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When discussing the play he observed that:
The beginning of
Twelfth Night
deals with bereavement: we see a girl hopelessly distressed, having lost her brother but then,
because of hope and friendship she is able to re-invent herself: a disguise allows her to create a new life. That’s comedy, not because it’s funny, but because hope and joy can be seen to spring from happiness.
Twelfth Night
also shows the comedy of falling in love, which occurs when people turn themselves inside out and almost reach the edge of madness. There are a thousand different ways of laughing and I think that
Twelfth Night
touches them all.
58
Taking a more extreme approach to the comic aspects, Adrian Noble’s 1997 production had an exaggerated and comic nonrealist feel to the characters, setting, and costumes: “When there are gags to be gone for, Noble goes for them, adopting the anarchic visual humour of pantomime.”
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The set, with brash, bold primary colors, was reminiscent of a child’s play-box: