Twelfth Night review – Samuel West achieves greatness as Malvolio
The title Twelfth Night inevitably tempts artistic directors at Christmas, although the nearest festive allusion is a jester called Feste and there is a pesky reference to the cruel duping and convoluted gender disguise of the plot being “midsummer madness”.
In Tom Littler’s superb current tinsel-inflected production at London’s Orange Tree theatre, that line is treated as ironically anti-seasonal, while Prasanna Puwanarajah’s equally but differently inventive RSC Stratford revival goes the whole yule log and substitutes “midwinter madness”. Samuel West’s Malvolio illustrates his infuriating Puritanism by snatching a Santa hat from a reveller.
Whereas Littler’s version was set after the second world war, in which Countess Olivia’s husband has died, Puwanarajah opts for a generic modernity where there are no telephones but the priest sips from an I ♥︎ Jesus mug. Curiously, Demetri Goritsas’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek is an American visitor to Illyria, his British title presumably, like Duke Ellington’s, a nickname bestowed for personality.
James Cotterill’s set is dominated by an enormous organ – visual innuendo in tune with Shakespeare’s cavalcade of phallic puns – on which ominous chords (emphasising the play’s inherent melancholy) from Matt Maltese’s score in George Dennis’s sound design are struck. But the huge musical instrument also allows the plotters against Malvolio to hide within its pipes and the duped steward to slide down one, like a fireman’s pole.
The rival Richmond show was, unusually for a textually small role, dominated by Stefan Bednarczyk’s Feste, orchestrating events from piano. Suggesting that bitter clowns are the best commentators on our times, Michael Grady-Hall’s shock-haired RSC Feste comes close to another minor character heist, abseiling in to perform, in styles from rock to unaccompanied ballad, the many songs Shakespeare gives the joker, between performing impressive magic illusions and spending the interval playing juggling games with the audience.
That it never becomes an evening with Feste is due to the matching magnificence of West. His Malvolio – sometimes strongly and poignantly invoking his great actor father Timothy, who died last month – is an aldermanic pedant whose petty tyranny comes unusually close to explaining the brutality of the household’s trick against him. Also outstanding is Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola, convincingly androgynous as “Cesario”, but searingly playing the pain of posing as male for a twin who believes her brother is dead. Freema Agyeman’s Olivia impressively portrays the vulnerability of someone moving from the certainty of grief to the paradoxes of attraction. The curiosity that major characters are near-anagrams – Malvolio, Olivia, Viola – is explained by a production emphasising that all have shared a society of misery and suspicion.
That two talent-packed Twelfth Nights should open within 12 days is imperfect for producers, viewers and critics. But two four-star productions resulting from radically different approaches – chamber in London, vast farce in Warwickshire – speaks to the breadth of theatrical invention but also to Shakespeare’s most protean play.
• At the Royal Shakespeare theatre, Stratford, until 18 January
