Twelfth Night
Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon
It’s a welcome refreshment after the RSC’s recent dramatisations of hard drinking and mass starvation in Russia to be landed on the sun-soaked coast of Mediterranean Illyria, and especially so in the company of a new and exquisitely beguiling Viola. Director Gregory Doran has been to much scholarly trouble in updating Shakespeare’s pirate-infested Illyria to Byron’s Albania. There, when visiting the court of a notorious warlord, Byron rhapsodised ‘The Turk, the Greek, the Albanian and the Moor/ Here mingled in their many-hued array’. Doubtless there were atrocities enough around the corner, but Doran has always been strong on devising exotic Mediterranean settings for Shakespeare’s comedies. He and designers Robert Jones (set) and Tim Mitchell (lighting) have done nothing better in this direction. They give us the Middle East of the Grand Tour in Napoleonic times, one in which the British gentry have made themselves so far at home as to have become quite the local lord and milady.
No point in looking for overmuch consistency here. What matters is the felicitous blend of period European manners and detail (gorgeous frocks for Olivia and exquisitely turned tailcoats and booted breeches for Orsino and for Viola disguised as Cesario) with Ali Baba costuming, carpets and cushions. Doran’s direction ensures that everything works wonderfully well with Shakespeare’s text, itself capacious enough to encompass Sir Toby Belch puffing away at his hookah while Feste disports himself as a whirling dervish.
Nancy Carroll is no stranger to the RSC and now, with the role of Viola, she is plainly up, up and away. Carroll radiates the confidence, good looks, charm and intelligence that recall the young Vanessa Redgrave’s bewitchment of the stage. Her delivery comes across as effortlessly natural in the very best sense of that much-abused word. There’s no straining after effect, no false emphases, just an utterly winning way with every word and, so critical in this of all Shakespeare’s comedies, the wounded feelings that lie behind them. Jo Stone-Fewings is her most admirable Mr Darcy of an Orsino.
In her masculine persona as Cesario, Carroll projects a perilous mastery of her hidden love for Orsino and of the double humiliation of having to woo another woman for him while at the same time finding herself the unwitting object of that lady’s own passion. She’s ideally matched against Alexandra Gilbreath’s beautifully played Olivia, the culmination of this fine actress’s own work with the RSC. By turns exultant and despairing in her girlish crush on the unamused Cesario, Gilbreath collapses with joyous incredulity against, ah yes, an antique pillar when Viola’s look-alike brother Sebastian, arriving late upon the scene, responds with alacrity to her invitation to be ‘rul’d by me’.
There’s a wicked moment when Doran has Orsino’s bare-chested male attendants, fresh from a Mediterranean dip, overhear Cesario’s aside, ‘myself would be his wife’, and are vastly amused by what they take as this handsome youth’s avowal of homosexual desire. There’s another delicious frisson when she’s nearly caught out by Orsino’s question whether the supposed sister, pining like ‘Patience upon a monument’, died of her love. ‘I am all the daughters of my father’s house’, she begins, then horrified at what she’s let slip, pauses meaningfully before jestingly following through with ‘a–, a–, and all the brothers too’. Fascinating, but not surprising, to read afterwards that that was exactly how Peggy Ashcroft played the dangerous moment.
Much pleasure, too, from Richard McCabe’s Toby Belch and the Aguecheek of James Fleet, well known as Hugo in The Vicar of Dibley. These dissolute knights, more often than not a total yawn, are here both gloriously funny and achingly sad. McCabe, fielding an outrageous display of funny walks, manages to be as totally surprised by the malfunctioning of his digestive system as we are. He holds the stage with everything he does, keeping us spellbound concocting a hangover cure from six expertly broken raw eggs, before downing it in one with predictable consequence. But McCabe never lets you forget the ruination behind the bravura fooling.
Matters are, alas, somewhat otherwise with the trumpeted appearance as Malvolio of another starry name from television, Richard Wilson, the curmudgeonly Victor Meldrew from One Foot in the Grave. Certainly a sour face is no impediment in a Malvolio and Wilson knows how to coax an icy lip into the semblance of a smile, but the relentlessly dyspeptic saw-tooth voice is equally no advantage. A richly plausible self-love needs to lie at the heart of the character. Here we saw only a Wilson self-caricature, well over the top in the grotesque display of his cross-gartered yellow stockings and grubby boxer shorts. But you don’t need to let this put you off. Be revenged by revelling in Doran’s heart-warming production and Nancy Carroll’s irresistible Viola.
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