Twelfth Night – a play by William Shakespeare
We went to see Twelfth Night at the National on Saturday. I think I saw the opening act in a drama competition once many years ago and Duke Orsino’s pathetic lament
If music be the food of love, play on,
give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
the appetite may sicken, and so die
at the start of the play had always appealed, for the poetry rather than the pathos. So, I was full of expectation.
The evening didn’t start too well. We got the train from Clapham Junction to Waterloo on a tight but sufficient timescale but then the train stopped 200 yards short of Queenstown Road. Someone was on the tracks – a terrible accident? a suicide? Everyone was patient, that is until we were told that it was a “fun” trespasser. We missed the first 15 minutes and Orsino’s lament. Who knows how many dates were missed; tickets wasted; lovers disappointed?
Two hours later, I rather wished I had missed more and not missed Dele Alli’s wonder goal (yet another) for Spurs against Watford on Match of the Day. What a terrible production!
The play is a complex one; toying with gender roles and cross casting; with love and infatuation; with reality and appearance. It has some very dated elements, not least the treatment of Malvolio/Malvolia. It has exquisite poetry. What it does not need is yet further sex changes to add to the disbelief (I still haven’t worked out whether one woman was playing what Shakespeare had intended to be a man or a woman, or indeed was a man doing the reverse). Nor does it need a fussy, fiddly stage setting, which was changing, admittedly cleverly but so what, every couple of minutes.
And why were Viola and her brother dressed as rather clean punks? Orsino and Olivia as business people? and many of the rest in assorted costumes through the ages? At least Viola and her brother were of the same ethnicity. I suppose the production would have been even more challenging if one had been black and the other white. The poetry, above all, needs clear, beautiful articulation not rather undistinguished method acting and overdone romping at every moment – not one sexual overtone, not one double entendre got away without the most unsubtle action replay.
Perhaps most of all, romantic comedies, no less than romantic tragedies, depend on the romance as much as the comedy. The tragedy of this production was that the comedy was flat and the romance simply incredible. There was no spark between Orsino and Viola/Sebastian nor between Olivia and Sebastian/Viola.
But maybe it was me, or rather us, as the performance got a standing ovation at the end, with plenty of hooting and hollering. But to my mind the director seemed either not to have confidence in Shakespeare’s play and its poetry or in a modern audience and its capacity to understand Shakespeare. Thank goodness for Iplayer and I did later get around to seeing Dele’s goal. Is that boy a genius?
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 