Twelfth Night: A queer reimagining with charm – but lacking emotional heft
In medieval times, Twelfth Night was sometimes marked by a role-play reversal game that allowed a man and a woman to become “king and queen” for the night, a jape that nods to the Lord of Misrule Christmas celebrations in which servants or peasants were put in charge of invariably wildly drunken celebrations. Owen Horsley’s vibrant if uneven production of Shakespeare’s riotous comedy runs with this idea – his Illyria is so much the makeshift kingdom of hedonist layabout Sir Toby Belch that poor Orsino, King of Illyria, barely gets a look in.
It’s a fitting interpretation for a play in which the servants of Orsino and the object of his unrequited love, the widow Olivia, largely drive the plot. Horsley though, goes a step farther still: in a play that dances with gender fluid possibility, his Sir Toby is a drag queen, lending another layer to the notion of supporting characters as central to the action.
Horsley sets the play largely in a cafe-cum-nightclub that bears the name “Olivia” in neon lights. A cabaret singer knocked sideways by grief for her dead brother, Anna Francolini’s Olivia is, nonetheless, pure prima donna who can’t help but imagine herself as dramatic spectacle, clutching the urn containing her brother’s ashes from behind an ostentatious black veil and later appearing for her supposed wedding to “Cesario” (a disguised Viola) looking like a cross between Miss Haversham and Baby Jane. In a play in which clothes are often signifiers of role play and transformation, Michael Matus’s Sir Toby staggers about the cafe in platforms and padded lame dress, at one point urging his dim-wit sidekick Sir Andrew Aguecheek into a dress. Meanwhile in a couple of small, exquisitely observed scenes, the friendship between Viola’s twin brother Sebastian and Antonio is explicitly a love story.
Yet Horsley’s overlong production struggles to cohere the play’s admittedly disparate elements. The brightly coloured spectacle of drag culture has its own poignancy, but Twelfth Night is saturated in a singularly strange sad music that rarely sings out here. Evelyn Miller is a spirited, emotionally wretched Viola, transfixed by the possibly clinically depressed Orsino even as she must petition Olivia on his behalf, but she seems marginalised in a production that depends far too much for its energy on Sir Toby – a vivid character to be sure but hardly a particularly interesting one. Meanwhile Olivia’s servant Feste (Julie Legrand), who ought to somehow capture the play’s subversive spirit, struggles to make an impact.
It’s Richard Cant’s astonishing Malvolio – a bony withered nerd in buttoned-up tweed – who steals the show. As dry as a stick, he stands as an obvious pleasure-repressing, pointedly heteronormative counter to Sir Toby’s merry gay mayhem, yet Cant gives him a tortured inner life that’s agonising to witness. He’s also very funny – the scene in which he convinces himself Olivia is in love with him is gorgeous pure slapstick. Yet the darkness of the plot against him – one of the most quietly ugly in all Shakespeare – is underplayed. Horsley disrupts the play’s conventional ending with a particularly poignant final tableau, but this Twelfth Night only half delivers.
Until June 8. Tickets: 0333 400 3562; openairtheatre.com
