Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale? Most subsidised theatres hanker for political relevance. Even so, when the Royal Shakespeare Company planned its new production of Twelfth Night, they can hardly have expected that by Christmas 2024 we’d have Malvolio as prime minister. The curious thing is that, as portrayed by Samuel West, Shakespeare’s eternal killjoy cuts rather a sympathetic figure. He’s elegant in dress and carriage, with a shadow of a northern brogue to suggest that this is a man who has strived hard for his status and sees himself as upholding values that have a real, and higher, worth.
No spoilers, just bubbling, black-hearted delight at a show that subverts pious clichés about creativity
Against him stands Joplin Sibtain’s Toby Belch: bear-like in his George V whiskers and fur-lined coat. He’s a thoroughly aristocratic lord of misrule, and there’s something of Oliver Reed in his raddled courtesies and beefy self-assurance. Sibtain’s Sir Toby is poised permanently at the line where boozy joshing threatens to turn feral, and Maria (Danielle Henry) eggs him on; a little ball of crackling spite. One of the most impressive aspects of Prasanna Puwanarajah’s direction is that Malvolio’s eventual humiliation is latent, but no more, in the earlier revels. The bitter notes rise, linger, and are blown away in a puff of fantasy – or one of Feste’s lilting songs.
Puwanarajah doesn’t clobber you with it; there’s no lurch in tone, and no insistence upon whose side you’re supposed to take. Instead, there’s elegantly executed slapstick and a playful strain of absurdism, carried through into James Cotterill’s designs. A dangling light-pull has the power to turn out the sun. Feste (Michael Grady-Hall) has a banana protruding from his crotch, and a colossal organ (the musical sort) dominates the back of the set to justify the Christmassy chorales and Wurlitzer pratfalls of Lindsey Miller’s keyboard-dominated score. West, kinkily cross-gartered, slides down its entire two-storey height – and in fairness, he’s got the legs for it.
If the serious characters don’t feel quite as nuanced, that’s partly Shakespeare’s fault, though Puwanarajah isn’t above reversing the order of the opening two scenes, which puts Orsino (Bally Gill, suave and smiling) and Olivia (Freema Agyeman, in slightly brittle girlboss mode) on the back foot from the off. But there’s nothing two-dimensional about Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola; plucky, thoughtful and plausibly boyish, with a face as well as a voice that never (until the end) loses a gentle undertow of sadness. ‘My father had a daughter loved a man,’ she begins, and it really does have a dying fall.
Verse-speaking as musical as this is by no means a given at the RSC, and Keyworth’s final reunion scene hits you surprisingly hard – the more so as Puwanarajah has spent much of the second half building the momentum of the comedy until it’s spinning along with the energy of pure farce. It’s an almost physical thrill: familiar from Mozart or Rossini, but less so in recent Shakespeare productions, where directors often struggle to carry their baggage lightly. The highest praise that I can give to this staging is that Puwanarajah never forgets that Twelfth Night is a comedy – and that he’s there to put on a show. Go and see it: you’ll laugh. Seriously.
Nancy Harris’s The Red Shoes is the RSC’s other seasonal offering, and I’d imagined a Kneehigh-style adaptation of the Powell and Pressburger movie. More fool me: we’re in a vaguely contemporary Britain where the orphaned Karen (Nikki Cheung) has been adopted, purely for the optics, by the social-climbing Mariella (Dianne Pilkington) and Bob (James Doherty). Their teenage son Clive (Joseph Edwards) dismembers cats for fun. Poor Karen, meanwhile, longs to dance. You can guess where this is going. It’s a family show from a major subsidised company: stand by for an uplifting parable about girl power, the miracle of art – and ghastly Brexity provincials getting their overdue comeuppance.
That is not what happens. Believe me: that is not what happens, at all. No spoilers here: just bubbling, black-hearted delight at a show that cheerfully subverts pious clichés about creativity, right up to a denouement that’s so startling, so macabre and so blackly hilarious that the gasps of disbelief nearly drowned the laughter. Kimberley Rampersad’s production is exuberantly realised in greens and deep reds, with properly magical puppet-work, a lush score (by Marc Teitler) that filters Piazzolla through Danny Elfman, and dancing of thrilling, kinetic power from Cheung.
But Pilkington’s sultry, screeching Scouse diva is also a comic knockout (imagine Margaret Thatcher played by Cilla Black) and Sebastien Torkia exudes sinister charisma as the Mephistophelean shoemaker Sylvestor. He promises us a fairy tale, and a fairy tale is what we get, just not the Disney kind. Whoever chose The Red Shoes as the RSC’s Christmas treat is a very sick puppy, and I’d like to shake them by the hand.
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