Gender was frequently blended in the world of Elizabethan theatre, given that women were banned from the stage and all the roles were performed by men. Perhaps William Shakespeare was making a sly comment on the practice with Twelfth Night, which repurposes a few elements from his earlier The Comedy of Errors (twins, a shipwreck, mistaken identity, tangled romance) but has as its protagonist Viola (Alfie Gledhill), a young woman who takes on a male identity, Cesario, after she is shipwrecked. She’s looking for her twin brother, Sebastian (Isabel Burton). In this new production from Bell Shakespeare, the two actors initially play each other’s parts before swapping, just to add an extra frisson of enjoyable confusion.
From there, we get a tangled knot of love – both unrequited and otherwise – and mistaken identity. Louche Duke Orsino (Garth Holcombe) uses Cesario to press his suit on the grieving Countess Olivia (Ursula Mills). Viola, disguised as Cesario, has fallen in love with Duke Orsino. Olivia sets her romantic sights on Cesario – or possibly Viola, or perhaps Sebastian – as he wanders through the action of the play largely puzzled by whatever’s going on.
The six original songs penned by Blasko for the production offer a sombre counterpoint to the ostensibly comic thrust of the narrative...
Meanwhile, Olivia’s steward, Malvolia (reconfigured here from the usually male Malvolio, and played with a striking mix of pomposity and vulnerability by Jane Montgomery Griffiths) carries a torch for her mistress – which gives drunken hangers-on Sir Toby Belch (Keith Agius) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Mike Howlett), along with servant Maria (Amy Hack), an opportunity for some cruel mischief. And all the while the fool Feste (Tomáš Kantor) is a perpetual agent of chaos, banging out tunes penned by Sarah Blasko on the upright piano (which provides the main element of set dressing on a fairly minimalist stage) and prompting idle thoughts such as: “If Michael Hutchence had ever done Rocky Horror, it would have looked a bit like this.”
Director Heather Fairbairn has made a good fist of Twelfth Night, subverting some of the inherent homophobia in the play. The first act does take a while to settle down – there is, perhaps unavoidably, a lot of table-setting involved. However, comic chops honed during the four-month national tour that preceded the Sydney Opera House season carry the day, with razor-sharp wordplay and some shameless physical capering drawing big laughs from the crowd.
Unfortunately, some of the minimalist staging leaves a little to be desired. While the creative use of a few modular prop trees works wonders, the decision to have the wings visible to the audience is a baffling one – being able to see actors changing costumes or simply waiting for their cue to enter the scene added nothing to the entertainment, and was at times irritatingly distracting.
But to paraphrase another Shakespeare work, we come to praise Twelfth Night, not to bury it, and there are plenty of reasons to add Bell Shakespeare’s latest offering to your calendar. Performances are uniformly strong, and high marks go to supporting players Agius, Howlett, and Hack for wringing every ounce of comic potential out of every throwaway line and bit of physical business. The six original songs penned by the ARIA-winning Blasko for the production offer a sombre counterpoint to the ostensibly comic thrust of the narrative – reminding us that, for all the ribaldry, the story is rooted in real emotion and longing.
The reinterpretation of Malvolio/Malvolia reinforces this. Normally presented as an arrogant low-key villain whose ultimate humiliation is richly deserved, in Fairbairn and Griffiths’ hands the character evokes real pathos – and her reaction to being imprisoned for insanity following Belch, Aguecheek, and Maria’s machinations is a showstopper. Certainly, it breaks the general comedic tone like an anvil dropped on a glass coffee table, but it also forces the audience to confront what, exactly, they’ve been laughing at over the entire course of the play. Whether this approach works in context is debatable, but it’s certainly a bold take on the extant material, and Griffiths delivers the production’s standout performance among a company that’s not exactly short on talent.
Ultimately, this production at times visibly struggles to find a comfortable midpoint between doing something new and interesting with a work of Shakespeare, and doing what simply works in the play as it stands. On balance, it all comes together well, but that struggle makes it a solid winner rather than an absolute triumph.
Twelfth Night plays at the Sydney Opera House until November 19, 2023. Tickets are $45-$110 and you can snap them up over here.
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