[In the following review of Trevor Nunn's 1996 film version of Twelfth Night, Lyons describes the effort as undeniably successful, and finds that although the film teases the boundaries of “heterosexual decorum,” it never oversteps them. Additionally, Lyons praises the film's principal actors: Imogen Stubbs as Viola/Cesario, Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia, and Toby Stephens as Orsino.]

It is sometimes foolishly asserted—recently, for example, by the critic Anthony Lane in the New Yorker—that Shakespeare “works” better on the screen than in the theater. Those knotty iambic pentameters can be spoken softly, and hence understood; soliloquies can be rendered as voice-overs, and hence made dramatically plausible. But if theater conventions are artificial and limiting, the same is true of film, which is hardly the transparent or naturalistic medium it may appear to be. And quite apart from the issue of technique, there is the issue of interpretation: fashions in filming Shakespeare reflect the day as dimly or as brightly as does the mirror of the stage.

We are now in the midst of a mild movie renaissance for the Bard, with four new movies of different plays having been released in the last months alone. …

In addition to these two failures [Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet and Al Pacino's Looking for Richard], however, the current season has also given us large, bright, intelligent, and relatively straightforward versions of Hamlet and Twelfth Night. …

But that brings us to Trevor Nunn's lovely Twelfth Night, a much more unqualified success. It too is a movie that flirts in passing with contemporary preoccupations, but in the end is content to know, love, and serve the Bard.

Nunn, the longtime head of the Royal Shakespeare Company, and recently appointed director of the Royal National Theater, has previously made two undistinguished films (Hedda and Lady Jane). This time he gets it right. He has set his tale in the same era as Branagh's Hamlet—a generic late-19th century—but his place, the mythical kingdom of Illyria, is much greener and more summery than Branagh's chilly Denmark. Nunn and his cinematographer Clive Tickner have cast a pre-Raphaelite glow over the film, which was shot along the wild coast and in the formal gardens of Cornwall. These settings work beautifully to complement the glow of the central story: a young woman impersonates a man and has to contend with both the attraction of another woman to her male persona and her own attraction to a man who treats her as a guy. Although the film exploits its erotic situations with a knowingness very much of the 1990's, Nunn resists every opportunity to turn sly flirtatiousness into campy gender-bending. Heterosexual decorum is teased but never “subverted.”.

The principals are also right on pitch. Imogen Stubbs, as the disguise-wearing Viola/Cesario, devotes less energy to parodying masculinity than to showing the awkwardness of loving and being beloved in the wrong places. Helena Bonham Carter, a pillar of British costume dramas who herself played Ophelia in the not-bad 1990 Franco Zeffirelli/Mel Gibson Hamlet, makes a surprisingly animated, sexy, and likably foolish Olivia, smitten with Viola/Cesario. Toby Stephens as Orsino, who is besotted with the unreceptive Olivia and shares his fond confidences with an in-turn-besotted Viola/Cesario, engagingly presents the figure of a man who can combine authority and modesty. The final resolution of all these confusions is an immensely pleasing and deft piece of romantic cinema.

This is a Twelfth Night that deserves to be seen and savored. And so, for all its missteps, does Branagh's Hamlet. The two plays had, in the trajectory of Shakespeare's career, some interesting connections. Twelfth Night was the last play of its kind, the last “festive comedy” he wrote; and it came right before Hamlet, which has been seen by scholars as a deliberate abandonment of comedy. As the critic C. L. Barber has noted, in Twelfth Night “the unnatural can appear only in outsiders, intruders who are mocked and expelled,” whereas in Hamlet “it is insiders who are unnatural.”

A mark of the playwright's genius was the ability to hold such antithetical ideas in so close and creative a tension. Likewise, a mark of good Shakespeare productions is to let his stories, ideas, and language breathe. By doing so, Kenneth Branagh and, especially, Trevor Nunn go some way toward redeeming the damage caused by the interposition of cute ideas—whether toxic, like Grunge Shakespeare, or relatively benign, like Method Shakespeare—between ourselves and the plays.