When it comes to questions of sexual ambivalence and crossing gender-barriers, Twelfth Night is the one Shakespeare play that offers disturbingly modern ideas about the way some people are designed to fall for both men and women.
Lindsay Posner cleverly locates his production in the Edwardian age of uncertainty, when young feminists and suffragettes were derided as unwomanly and dandyish male aesthetes reckoned no better than effeminate.
There are also interesting hints that the identical twins, Viola and Sebastian, not to mention lllyria's Duke Orsino and the Countess Olivia, emerge from the play's outbreak of passions and hankerings as tentative bisexuals.
When Viola, convincingly disguised as an androgynous youth, is passionately kissed on the mouth by Olivia, she recoils, but then draws the Countess into an even closer meeting of lips. At the play's conclusion, the two women once more seal their lips together in a display that's either bravado or bravura passion. Sebastian, first seen sitting on a bed after an apparently erotic night with sailor Antonio, may end up happily with Olivia, but he first stops by dandyish Orsino. The embrace he offers the Duke is anxiously repelled.
Unfortunately, Posner lacks the courage of his convictions. That kiss apart, Zoe Waites's Viola shows no sign of being smitten by Olivia. And Ben Meyjes's Sebastian comes to treat Antonio as if he were just a good friend. The scene-setting, since
few characters appear seriously Edwardian, proves mainly decorative. So this Twelfth Night skims lightheartedly across the comedy's jovial surface. Deeper currents of Edwardian melancholia, that Twelfth Night sense of love as absurdity or transient madness, the magical reconciliation of the finale are all missing.
Designer Ashley Martin-Davis's set is blandly neutral, with sliding, wooden-louvred panels and ugly green blocks for the garden scenes. There's no distinction between Orsino's romantic Illyria and Olivia's house of deep mourning. The forestage is all vacuously art nouveau with Beardsley, Klimt and Gaugin on the walls. Jo Stone-Fewings sends up Orsino as a romantic, empty-headed Edwardian poser, who's neither elated nor ashamed that he's sexually excited
by a youth. Miss Waites achieves many sad catches in her voice and successfully adopts the air of a tremulous adolescent male. But she's no ironic, wistful lover or passionate griever for her lost twin. Matilda Ziegler's Olivia manages to be nothing more than jaded.
It's the near-farcical presentation of the comic subplot that wins most sympathy. Barry Stanton's Toby Belch begins crudely as a vomiting drunk in a soiled suit, rollicking with Christopher Good's bawling, far too effete Sir Andrew, but develops well as a cruel revenger. Guy Henry, looking as lanky as a dragon-fly, dressed in striped trousers and sporting a sepulchral voice ought be a natural Malvolio. Yet he misses the adorable Malvolian characteristics of smugness and self-approval, grandeur and pomposity. Although he revels in Malvolio's silliness in love, his overpitched performance is more sketch than portrait. Only Mark Hadfield's dapper, deadpan Feste, a Charlie Chaplin figure, nonchalantly observing love's pangs and pains captures that elusive Twelfth Night Spirit.
Twelfth Night (Or What You Will)
