John Carlisle's Malvolio (replacing Antony Sher) is the only major cast change in Bill Alexander's production since Jeremy Kingston reviewed it in Stratford last July; but the immediate impression is that its characters are meeting for the first time.

Nothing quite fits. There is a distracted, hollow-eyed Viola (Harriet Walter) who suggests more the last act of a tragedy than the opening of a comedy. Donald Sumpter's Orsino is a grizzled autocrat with none of the expected marks of a romantic lover. In years, at least, he is a match for Deborah Findlay's Olivia; but it then comes as a shock to meet her uncle Toby (Roger Allam) who could be half her age.

Feste (Bruce Alexander) is another middle-aged figure who pushes the privileges of folly to the limit of sardonic bombast and haunts the Illyrian courts in rags; though even his costume is more prepossessing than the bedraggled rompers in which the well-to-do Augucheck (David Bradley) hopes to seduce Olivia.

Illyria this time appears to be a part of the Greek hinter-land, represented (by Deirdre Clancy and Kit Surrey) with baggy trousers and embroidered full-length skirts; and a village setting with a bell tower at the apex of a honeycomb of massive walls, perspectives of deep blue sky through rough-cut archways, and benches on the the house exteriors. It is on those benches that the show starts taking shape.

Toby and Maria (Pippa Guard) flop down on one of them and start gossiping while she feeds him slices of melon. Olivia sits Feste down to advise him that his jokes are offending people. An intimate atmosphere at once springs up in this public square. It may not be the usual interior world of Twelfth Night—traditionally a play of mirrored rooms—but if affords the characters a means of coming to life.

On this occasion it is less an exquisite lyric comedy than a boisterous piece for the market place, animating every inch of the space. In particular, it excels in false exits, prolonged down narrow alleyways and out of sight, and then brought hurtling back like a ball just before the elastic snaps.

Harriet Walter shows signs of wilting in the face of all the full-blown ruderies, and comes into her own only when her knees turn to water before the Aguecheek duel. But the multiple intrigues go off like a bomb.

Allam's Sir Toby is a virile young hell-raiser, equipped with all the gentlemanly graces which vanish in a roar when the drink gets to him. Bradley's Aguecheek hovers round him as an grim-faced pleasure-seeker, always missing the point, and trying to preserve his dignity by pretending he understands perfectly.

It is a cruelly funny relationship, and the cruelty runs riot when it fastens on Carlisle's Malvolio, an invincibly stately personage who then arrives in the likeness of a Greek dancing girl before being chained up by the neck in a dripping dungeon. Seldom has the horror of the farcical climax been projected with such impact.

There is also comedy in the most unexpected places; as where Orsino's musicians flock round to give him lute therapy when Olivia finally rejects him; and in Toby's last act line, "I hate a drunken rogue" delivered straight to his patroness as a plea not to throw him out of the house.

PRODUCTION:

Kenneth Branagh • Renaissance Theatre Company • 1987

BACKGROUND:

Kenneth Branagh's production with the Renaissance Theatre Company set Twelfth Night in a wintry Illyria that evoked the England of Charles Dickens. H. R. Woudhuysen cautioned, however, that this was not "the Dickens of Pickwick or A Christmas Carol but of Bleak House and Little Dorrit, where secrecy and tragedy will eventually give birth to revelation and joy." Making full use of the play's seasonal associations, the set of the Riverside Studios featured a Christmas tree and a snowy cemetery in the center stage that was used for Malvolio's imprisonment. Critics generally approved of the director's sole liberty with the text: Branagh transposed the first and second scenes of the drama in order to combine the charm of the play with its underlying strangeness. Audiences and critics alike responded favorably to Branagh's direction; Kenneth Hurren declared it to have been "quite the most enjoyable production of the comedy I have seen for decades." This staging was further praised for several fine performances; outstanding among them was Richard Briers's Malvolio, which Hurren characterized as "as fine a realisation of that famous role as you could wish to see." Reviewers additionally praised the performances of Abigail McKern as Maria, Frances Barker as Viola, Anton Lesser as Feste, James Saxon as Sir Toby, and James Simmons as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

COMMENTARY: