Lovers in the Levant

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.