Music is not just the food of love, but serves up a feast of musical gags in Prasanna Puwanarajah’s witty, warm-hearted production that is just the ticket for Christmas entertainment. It’s a blast.
Dominating the stage are the huge pipes of a triple-manual organ, which provide an alternative hiding place to the usual box tree for Malvolio’s tormentors, and on which they play their own percussive melody, while down below, organist Thom Petty enters into the spirit of things, acting the drunkard to slump on the keys, sending forth a great burst of sound such as may never have been heard in this theatre.
Twelfth Night is Shakespeare’s most musical play with Feste given most of the songs, performed to good effect by Michael Grady-Hall to composer Matt Maltese’s lush piano accompaniment. The actor gives cursory attention to the character’s now dated verbal wit—which is fine by me—while being given a wide licence to play the clown, descending unexpectedly from the rafters, toying with the sound of the organ, plunging the entire auditorium into darkness by pulling an enormous lavatory chain.
Grady-Hall nevertheless exudes a sad fatalism that permeates the entire play, exemplified by Samuel West as Malvolio. Twelfth Night was originally performed during the winter revels, and Shakespeare’s audience probably saw him as a killjoy at a time for cakes and ale. West’s Malvolio, in love with himself, pompous, taking everything too seriously, does nevertheless achieve a sort of pathos here. Humiliated, looking ridiculously like King George V caught in his undies, his painfully expressed confession is attributed to his “obedient (pause)… hope” of winning his mistress’s love, and his famous parting oath of revenge is directed at the whole world, its closing lines uttered sotto voce, more in misery than in rage.
That West too finds an opportunity to play a little ragtime on the mighty organ typifies the whole production—an amusing gesture of little relevance in an enjoyable entertainment of no great profundity. There are hints of sexual permutations, Orsino’s male courtiers enjoying the odd pas de deux, and Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola, disguised as Cesario, telling Olivia, “you are fair” with a decided gulp, but such insinuations go no further.
Fair she certainly is, Freema Agyeman’s Olivia and Bally Gill as Orsino having film-star looks, and both passionate in their roles, Agyeman an awakening Sleeping Beauty, resolute, impetuous, reliable, Gill peremptory and one suspects not quite the one-woman man he protests to be.
As Viola, Gwyneth Keyworth is a picture of patient devotion, but her unflattering attire does nothing to help convince one of her transformation into the male Cesario. It matters not a lot that no-one could seriously mistake her for her supposed identical twin, but I wished there was a bit more swashbuckling to the quietly-spoken Rhys Rusbatch as Sebastian.
Joplin Sibtain is an unusually sympathetic Sir Toby, prone to blub as well as belch, and Demetri Goritsas’s natural American accent helps to explain the attachment of Sir Andrew Aguecheek as his lonely dupe, desperate, literally at all costs, to belong.
Danielle Henry is a spirited Maria, entering the Malvolio plot maybe as a last chance to snare Sir Toby, Norman Bowman is the noble-hearted sea captain Antonio—whose disappointment some see as reflecting Shakespeare’s own experience—and in the minor role of the priest, Emily Benjamin has a fixed expression of beaming beatitude. It’s that kind of show.
Reviewer: Colin Davison