The hugely imaginative theatre company Filter has won itself plenty of fans with its wittily sound-textured, gig-style theatre pieces. Fans won’t be surprised by the fact that the six actors playing this remix of ‘Twelfth Night’ are apparently shipwrecked on a sound-bank (complete with synthesiser, electric cello, wire-sprouting gizmos and the shipping forecast). And the plaintive, boozy jamming session which ensues (with the semi-naked Malvolio howling ‘M, O, A, I’ into the mike like a thrash-rock Puritan) does a lot to endear itself to viewer – there are backflips and free pizza, kids.
The stunts, along with the free-form, off-the-cuff style affected by the actors, soften up the boundaries between performers and audience very cosily. But Filter will have to do better than this chilled out rehash of a scratchy ‘Twelfth Night’ (originally workshopped for the RSC in 2006) if they are to break out of the ‘studio theatre for sixth formers’ commissioning bracket and produce the kind of work that their collective talent surely aspires to. Here, director Sean Holmes allows many of the performances to slope off to the wrong side of nonchalant: with the exception of Poppy Miller’s clear-as-a-bell Viola and Ferdy Roberts’s Malvolio (pictured with Gemma Saunders), the execution is way off the standard achieved by 2007’s ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’.
When critics dislike redux Shakespeare it’s customary to mourn lost text. This is not too far from the text, but far too dependent on the audience’s familiarity with it to stand alone. Its main insight is to write a score for the emotions and lyrics of the play: each character plays his unrequited rhythm out in crooning, howling or stuttering horseplay. But it’s also slack and over-dependent on old-hat stuff like chatting verse into mobiles. Thirty minutes in, it all feels as wrecked as the tequila-slamming Sir Toby Belch – and it’s a long journey home from there.
