Doing Shakespeare
is always challenging, given the long and illustrious history of performances
against which yours can be compared. And with today's surfeit of movie
adaptations ranging from the excellent (Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and
Juliet) to the terrible (Michael Almereyda's Hamlet, with
Ethan Hawke as the Prince of Denmark), one has the feeling that there
is tremendous pressure on a director to do something new and hip with
the script. Thankfully, the Stage Club's Twelfth Night eschewed
the need to be hip, and focused on good fundamentals instead. The result
was a tight, intelligent and entertaining performance that captured
the heart of the comedy and was anything but cut and dried.
The choice to stage Twelfth Night in a post-World War II setting
was a canny one which gelled perfectly with the essence of the play.
The decadence of Shakespeare's upper-crust Illyrian society resonated
with the setting: where no one worked, the people fell in and out of
love, the ladies-in-waiting swigged gin, and the fool crooned jazz in
the background. At the same time, certain key elements of the play remained.
The summery coastal setting, shown in nautical costumes and lush green
plants, created a mood for romance and comedy. The languid songs about
love, taken from an original 1940s jazz score and recorded by The Stage
Club, went a long way toward enhancing this atmosphere. The era also
realistically presented the class distinction between the idle social
set to which Duke Orsino (Musa Fazal) and Lady Olivia (Kim Maxwell)
belonged, and the people working in their households.
The main and sub-plots ran together seamlessly with an energy that
came from lucid, well-timed delivery and great cast chemistry. My long-time
irritation with high jinks and hysterics passing as comedy was pleasantly
unprovoked. The ensemble also managed a rare balance of varied characters:
characters were fleshed out almost equally, filling the play with dramatic
variety and interest.
Grief and love begin the play, as embodied by Olivia and Orsino respectively.
Countess Olivia is mourning for her dead brother (though her black veil
only appears when guests arrive). And Duke Orsino declares his love
for Olivia (though this love is qualified by his advice to his young
servant Cesario, played by Elena Scherer, to marry a younger woman to
mitigate the fact that men will tire of women once their beauty fades).
Of course, the key to the plot is the fact that Cesario is actually
shipwrecked noblewoman Viola in disguise (and drag), and her near-identical
twin brother Sebastian (Patrick McConnell) has unknowingly also washed
up on Illyria. Cesario/Viola, acting as Orsino's emissary of love, captures
the heart of Olivia, whose aforementioned show of mourning changes rapidly
to a show of lusty obsession. Viola's own mourning for a brother she
believes is dead runs a parallel course to Olivia's, when she sidesteps
her grief to declare to the audience in the first act that she is in
love with Orsino. When a clueless Sebastian appears, his family resemblance
to Viola/Cesario means that Olivia mistakes him for her beloved and
wastes no time in marrying him.
A slight letdown was the lack of a stronger romantic lyric in this
love tangle. Scherer, as Viola/Cesario, has lines that contain some
of Shakespeare's best love poetry and also outline the poignancy of
Viola's unique situation. However, there was little sensuousness in
Scherer's Viola, nor in her interaction with other characters. As the
central character, Viola has an anchoring role, but Scherer was somewhat
overshadowed by her showier co-stars.
As happens in many of Shakespeare's comedies, the sub-plot stole the
show, driving the lively pace and drawing out the underlying social
commentary about class. The drunken carousing of Olivia's layabout uncle,
Sir Toby Belch (Barry Woolhead), and her suitor, the lisping and "most
foolish knight" Andrew Aguecheek (Angela Barolsky), was hilarious. The
two collaborate with the sparky Maria (Maureen McConnell), Olivia's
lady-in-waiting, to plant a fake love letter from Olivia to Olivia's
sour head steward, Malvolio (Phil McConnell). Onstage, the result was
thoroughly amusing. McConnell got entirely under the skin of his character,
giving us a self-important and grumpy Malvolio who became so crassly
delighted at having a chance to improve his station in life that he
transformed into a buffoon to rival Feste, the play's clown. The humour
is tinged with a dark edge, however, when Malvolio is declared insane,
thrown into a darkened cell, and subjected to some torturous teasing
by Feste (Paul Hannon).
The final resolution, however, focuses on the revealing of Viola's disguise
and the happy marriages of Orsino and Viola, Olivia and Sebastian, and Sir
Toby and Maria. As no production of Twelfth Night is complete without a
suggestion of homoeroticism, Musa's Orsino displayed a vigorous, too hasty
happiness in claiming his wife as soon as it was revealed that Cesario is
actually a woman.
Zesty, funny and with a solid core, Twelfth Night was a success
of comedy and of Shakespeare that is rarely experienced in Singapore.
The Stage Club has proven that one need not use gimmicks to make Shakespeare
(or any play) exciting, and that good basics are a surefire way to success.
One only hopes that other theatre groups will realise this too. |
"The Stage Club has proven that one need not use gimmicks to make
Shakespeare exciting, and that good basics are a surefire way to success"
Second Opinion
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