Twelfth Night (25 page)

Bartlett:
Yes, it goes deeper—if Viola is played by a young man. Both Orsino and the audience (at least in our production) hugely enjoyed the fact that he is “really” getting off with a gorgeous boy at the curtain call. It explains such a lot about him, don’t you think?

Orsino can sometimes seem a rather shallow courtly lover in the opening act, then he’s offstage for a very long time before his return at the end: does this present peculiar problems for a director and an actor?

Mendes:
Orsino’s a much better part than people think. I don’t think it does present a problem. Mark Strong was sensational in the role. I think he’s lovesick: in other words he’s in love with the exquisite pain of being in love—a love that is unrequited. So once you’ve established that he is actually hungry for that state, is trapped in it, and is almost unwilling to come out of it, I think it’s a wonderful part. Very funny actually, and rather touching. So it didn’t strike me as an issue.

Donnellan:
It is structurally curious; rather like the absence of Post-humus through the middle of
Cymbeline
, but this is possibly explained by the fact that the actor playing Orsino may have been playing another part. Orsino may have doubled as Maria—in which case the actor playing Orsino would probably have been rather short!

Bartlett:
If you think he’s shallow in his first scene, then you definitely have a problem. If, however, you think he is a powerful portrait of a powerful man—handsome, charismatic, sexy, obsessed, passionate—with some of the most drop-dead lines in the (or any) play, then you’re all set for a great evening. If you think obsessive behavior, sexual ambiguity, and laughable human folly are “shallow,” then you shouldn’t be directing
Twelfth Night
 …

Are we meant to believe in the marriage between Sebastian and Olivia?

Mendes:
Yes. I think the easy way out when you direct it is to ironize those things in the last acts of Shakespearean comedies. The really difficult thing to do, like at the end of
The Winter’s Tale
when Camillo and Paulina suddenly pair off, is to make the audience believe it. You could say that the real challenge of the play is to make these impossible moments seem possible.

Donnellan:
The triangle of Sebastian, Antonio, and Olivia is complex. Both Antonio and Olivia give Sebastian money, which you notice he never manages to refuse. Olivia herself has the line: “For
youth is bought more oft than begged or borrowed,” which is remarkable. Certainly Sebastian’s conversion from Antonio’s love-object to Olivia’s is very fast. It’s hard not to believe that this rapid change is not lubricated by cash. Even Orsino is impressed by Olivia’s wealth!

However, who are we to judge? When Sebastian sees the new sun, he sees that it is glorious. Perhaps he is more sincere than he seems. Perhaps he has been transfigured by love, like his sister. We often forget that Sebastian also disguises himself as Roderigo at the beginning of the play. Why should he do this? He is a complex character and far removed from a two-dimensional juvenile lead.

Bartlett:
Well … it’s not going to last very long, is it? He’s over the moon—she’s rich, beautiful, and (best of all, if you’re a horny teenager who rather enjoys people falling in love with him) she is sexually and emotionally impulsive. She, however, is humiliated, furious, trapped in a marriage even more ridiculous than the one she escaped from with Orsino. Hardly a recipe for success. On the other hand, he is a very handsome young man, and well educated, and so who knows …

Music seems particularly important in this play. What implications did that have for your production? And what about Feste’s songs in particular?

Mendes:
Huge. Music starts the play, and sets its tone. It’s crucial. It seems to me that when songs are sung, unlike any other play in the canon with the possible exception of
As You Like It
, people simply sit and listen to them. “Come Away Death” and “O Mistress Mine,” they sit and listen, and then at the end we the audience sit and listen to “The Wind and the Rain.” They’re very static songs: even at the beginning with “If music be the food of love, play on,” Orsino sits and listens. The act of listening to music is actually pivotal, it’s central to the play. The music itself, therefore, has to have an emotional resonance. I was really pleased with the music, which was written by George Stiles. It’s one of the things that I remember most from the production.

Donnellan:
Music is integral to all our work. We began rehearsals by investigating the space through music, thus music was always crucial
to our investigation. Feste’s songs are crucial as he is the paid entertainer, exactly akin to the actors onstage.

Bartlett:
Music is in the heart of the play. It opens it and closes it. The music is incredibly interior—apart from the “catch” scene, all the music is about hidden emotion. The last song, for instance, is the exact opposite of the communal merrymaking that usually closed an Elizabethan comedy … that’s why I put Feste and his grand piano in the center of the stage. For all its glorious mechanics, it’s a very introspective play … it probes the heart, which is music’s job.

At the beginning of the play Feste has returned after an unexplained absence. Did you and your actor feel it necessary to devise a “back-story” in order to get inside Feste’s character?

Donnellan:
Well, I have worked with five different Festes over the years and with each we discussed what might have happened previously, his possible reasons for leaving the house, and each time I think we came up with different conclusions! But such work is crucial to give authority to the actor. Incidentally, most of these “discussions” would have taken the form of physical exercises.

6.
Feste’s songs are crucial “as he is the paid entertainer, exactly akin to the actors onstage”: Igor Yasulovich as Feste and Dmitry Dyuzhev as Sir Andrew in Declan Donnellan’s 2007 production during the RSC Complete Works Festival.

Bartlett:
Well, he’s a musician, and a comedian, and they’re always temperamental bastards … Olivia just kicked him out for a while, and he needed the work, so he’s been moonlighting at Orsino’s.

How did you stage the great letter scene?

Mendes:
Once we decided to place it inside his bedroom it unlocked all sorts of interesting things. Because it was in his private space you immediately got drawn into his private fantasy world in a much more serious way. There was a sense that he did this all the time, that he had a very vivid fantasy world which involved him and Olivia on a regular basis. This wasn’t new, it was something that he’d already been fantasizing about for years. He lay on his bed and was clearly about to indulge in a sexual fantasy, and there was a feeling that we shouldn’t be in this room with him, and neither should Sir Toby, Andrew, and Fabian, who were hiding behind the screen.

Donnellan:
We decided to take the character of Malvolio absolutely seriously. This made the pain and humiliation that Malvolio experiences all the more serious and real, which in turn made it all the more funny. Comedy always has its feet in pain!

Bartlett:
It staged itself. We were working on a bare stage, and didn’t need a box-tree because we already had a grand piano to hide behind, so it was just a question of working out, move by move, how three people could hide from a fourth on a bare stage as he shared his predicament with the audience … my only rule was that he could never stand still or face one way for very long—otherwise there’s no gag, they’re just safely upstage and he’s safely downstage. The whole point is that the scene is a virtuoso demonstration of the fact that love is blind; even though they’re right there with him, he never sees them. Of course it helps if your Malvolio (John Lithgow) is six foot three and a natural physical clown.

Sir Toby and Sir Andrew are often perceived as especially lovable characters, but Malvolio’s view of them as idle drunken parasites is not without justice, is it?

Mendes:
No, I think they’re complete liggers! They’re total leeches, especially Sir Toby. They live off other people, they don’t do a stroke of work. But at the same time they’re not entirely wrong when they seem to ask, “What’s the point?” For me, the key to Sir Toby and Sir Andrew is that they’re older characters, coming into the twilight of their lives, dealing with past disappointments, and learning to come to terms with compromise. They’re not young and vivacious, they’re drinking to stave off melancholy, and to forget. There’s a tangible sense of disappointment about them and Toby’s cruelty emerges out of that: his own self-loathing, his own sense of regret. However, it is Sir Toby who in many ways drives the action of the play, particularly in the second half.

Donnellan:
No, I think there are things to be said for and against all of Shakespeare’s characters. Shakespeare is anti-sentimental and he is great precisely because he is nonjudgmental about his characters. Like Chekhov, Shakespeare invites us to draw our own conclusions about the characters he presents.

Bartlett:
Some of my best friends are idle, drunken parasites. What’s your point?

Is the gulling of Malvolio taken too far, when it comes to the darkened room? And does he recover his dignity at the end of the play? Whether or not his final exit line (“I’ll be revenged …”) gets a laugh—or what kind of laugh it gets—is often the test of a production
.

Mendes:
Too far compared to what? It’s taken as far as it needs to be taken in order to articulate the darkness in the story. I pushed it as far as I possibly could without distorting it. I think it tips over into cruelty, yes. I think that there is a streak of cruelty in Feste. He taunts Malvolio beyond what might seem funny or humane. I love those moments when darkness enters the comedies, they are the most exciting for me. Does Malvolio recover his dignity? Well, he recovers
his seriousness: whether he recovers his dignity is in a way up to the director and the actor. You can have him recover his seriousness then have him walk off with his clothes flapping around his heels and he’s funny. I didn’t want him to make him funny. I wanted to make him frightening.

I didn’t go into this production with a set of preconceived ideas or a heavily conceptual framework. I went into it with an open mind, and it was very unformed, image-based ideas that seemed to lead me. The only idea I presented to Simon Russell Beale [Malvolio] at the beginning of the process was to wonder how it would be if we were given access to Malvolio’s inner space. So the letter scene, which normally happens in the garden, happened in his bedroom, and the box-tree was actually a screen with a print of a box-tree on it. That unlocked a lot of different things in the role. One felt one had been shown inside Malvolio’s inner sanctum, and that made him seem very vulnerable. So his punishment consequently felt all the more harsh. And in part because of that, I think, the line “I’ll be revenged …” was met with silence. Dead silence. It wasn’t funny, it was awkward. Like someone letting off an air-raid siren in the middle of a violin concerto.

7.
Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio in Sam Mendes’ 2002 production at the Donmar Warehouse in London—the letter scene set in a bedroom (“the box-tree was actually a screen with a print of a box-tree on it. That unlocked a lot of different things in the role”).