Twelfth Night

In Sydney for its last stop, this Twelfth Night has travelled many more nights and days  across the country.  With an economical staging, using just an old piano and dead tree branches, Shakespeare’s arguably funniest comedy is here fashioned to appeal to schools – simple storytelling with lots of topical gender-bending and boisterous funny business.

The actors sit around the stage edges, as they often do in Bell Shakespeare shows, and Charles Davis’ modest costumes nicely reflect character but relate to no place or period.  Luckily the characters are so vivid.

Jane Montgomery Griffiths is outstanding as the prim and pompous steward Malvolia, normally a male Malvolio, but here a lesbian infatuated with her boss Olivia, who has banned all men from her court.  It adds a queer and bitter sting to how she is tricked, mocked and treated so cruelly in this nest of different love matches.

Queen Bee of it all is Tomas Kantor’s deliciously saucy Feste, the court fool but here snatched from the outrageousness of Rocky Horror. Kantor also plays and divinely sings beautifully melancholic songs by Sarah Blasko, enriching this play’s dark undercurrent through these often desperate quests for love.

The doomed courtship, however, between the aristocrats Olivia and Orsino is here less a focus than the usually subordinate characters of the drunken Toby Belch (a kilted, well-rounded Keith Arguis), the foolish and delusional Andrew Agucheek (Mike Howlett pushing physical comedy to the limit), and a spirited Maria from Amy Hack.

Shakespeare of course adored gender-bending, and created two identical twins separated in the play’s opening shipwreck, with one, Viola, dressed as a boy, becoming the new love obsession of both Orsino and Olivia.  Director Heather Fairbairn bends it further (into unnecessary confusion) by having Isabel Burton playing both twins, until Alfie Gledhill takes over the role of Viola then dresses in male drag.

As is frequent with BSC, there is inexplicable miscasting in some roles, with talent for real feeling and articulation not given priority.  Twelth Night is revealed as a comedy well-suited to our 21^st Century obsession with gender-bending, and David Bergman’s underlying sound design and Verity Hampson’s lighting helps forge a foothold in Davis’ on-stage world of nothing.  But by end unrestrained buffoonery breaks the seams.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman.