Twelfth Night – Review

Production photo, credits to Emma Shen

4/5 stars

Contains spoilers

Twelfth Night, perhaps appropriately for the annual BME Shakespeare play, is obsessed by diversity – about people differing within themselves and among themselves. It is fascinated by, as the love-lorn Count Orsino’s opening speech has it, the ‘high fantasticall’ shapes that ‘fancie’ can spur people on to take, whether that ‘fancie’ is of love or, as with the high-spirited Sir Toby Belch, the witty, slightly sad fool Feste, or the crafty maidservant Maria, the sheer delicious fun of deceiving others and of changing in oneself. There are, however, two sorts of changefulness on the enchanted isle of Illyria, where the play is set, one mostly commendable, the other mostly deplorable. The good one is unselfconscious, almost uncontrollable; it is Sir Toby’s delight in the sheer variousness of the world, but it is also the enforced changefulness of the twins Viola and Sebastian, twins who have been shipwrecked off the coast of the island and who do not know that the other is still alive. Viola must change her gender, acting as a man to be the Count’s servant, and must wrestle with the internal change of falling in love with him; Sebastian must accept two radical changes in his fortunes, being first saved from drowning by the benevolent Antonio, then being wooed and married by Lady Olivia, the object of Orsino’s affections who has mistaken him for Viola – whom she mistook for a man (the confusion you may feel is part of the point).

The other form of alterability is the self-willed and self-obsessed fickleness that characterises both Orsino and Olivia at the start of the play. Orsino loves not Olivia but the idea of love itself – wants, as the play’s opening and most famous line puts it, to feed love with music, because it allows him to sentimentally declaim about anything he chooses. Olivia is more in love with herself, and her apparently stony rejection of any suitor out of mourning for her dead brother contrasts with a vanity which, in this production, was amusingly emphasised. Yet if these two sorts of changefulness, unselfconscious and hyper-self-conscious, are the two extremes, all the action of the play comes from smashing the two together, so this comedy of endless misidentifications and alterations of fortune becomes not just about changefulness, but the changefulness of changefulness; how you might think you are faithful to your beloved but in fact confuse one twin for another, or how a change of gender performed to survive might allow for an unchanging love to bloom.

This production is very good at the changefulness of the play, at the extremes of self-consciousness or the lack of it, which made for an evening when the audience laughed often and loudly. Jamie Chen and Phoebe Deller are brilliant as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. Not only did they deliver their lines with great liveliness, but their bearing and gestures are both hilarious: Chen a great John Bull of a figure with a drunkard’s frown and a back bent as if with the weight of their belly, Deller ready to run scared at the slightest noise and with hands permanently up in front of them, like a dog’s paws. Indeed, the whole comic group, India Thornhill as Maria, Keziah Prescod as Fabian, Emma Shen as Feste, and Akua Addo-Yobo as various roles, were wonderful, and a scene where they all danced to a pop song was great fun.

Conversely, Andre Ediagbonya-Davies captures the self-importance of Orsino splendidly, with hands folded smugly before him and a wistful faux-melancholy diction which is just right for the Count’s poetising. Olivia Khattar has some particularly memorable moments as Olivia, particularly when, having just received Viola (posing as ‘Cesarino’ and carrying a love-message from the Count) she thinks him ‘well-favoured’, or handsome, and becomes gigglingly self-delighted, not so much at him but at the prospect of her wooing him. Malvolio too, played by Ebenezer Boakye, was convincingly self-deluding; perhaps this could even have been hammed up a bit more. 

But this production suffers slightly in, to continue using my absurd terminology, the changefulness of changefulness, the sense that pretence and reality can be exchanged for one another. This, together with sometimes clunky lighting and sound, and some stiff posture, especially when characters are not speaking, contributes to a lack of cohesion and movement. More seriously, it obscures the witty interplay between real and illusory in favour of a more cartoonish account of each character and their relations. This was a particular problem in the play’s central character, Viola, played by Yasmin Jafri – there was too much correctness and repression of feeling, especially early on. This difficulty, exacerbated by the decision to have her stand with her hands behind her back almost all of the time, prevented her betrothal to Orsino at the end of the play from convincing, although the restraint could often be both dramatically appropriate and very funny, as when she devastatingly replies ‘I pity you’ to Olivia’s declaration of love. But it was a problem in most of the main characters, and it meant that two major things were lacking. First, the queer subtext of this play – Olivia and Orsino both fall in love with a woman dressed as a man, which has opposite but equal queer possibilities for both of them – felt, with an exception I shall come to, underdeveloped, for such a subtext requires the boundary between real and illusion to be porous and uncertain. This lack was not remedied by having Olivia gaze longingly after Viola at the end of the play. Second, it meant that the ending did not feel very satisfactory, for there had been little alteration of the balance of convention and sentiment in lovers’ hearts, and thus little sense of the traditional comedic return from the abandonment of order into its transformed renewal.

The exception to these strictures was the relationship between, and individual performances of, Oluwatayo Adewole’s Sebastian and his rescuer, Leo Kwang’s Antonio, which I thought the best things in the play. In both, the combination of sentiment and decorousness, surprise at the peculiar things which happened to them and acceptance of the way of the world, was perfect (Sebastian’s delighted shock at being wooed by Olivia was a highlight). The homoerotic possibilities of Antonio repeatedly declaring his ‘love’ for Sebastian could thus be made explicit and were highly effective, although I would have liked to have seen them tied up more at the end. These performances transformed a very enjoyable evening out into something that shall make a lasting impression on how I think of the play, and of the endless mutability of love it offers us.