Twelfth Night (review) Christian M. Billing Shakespeare Bulletin, Volume 27, Number 3, Fall 2009, pp. 491-499 (Review) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/shb.0.0100 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/316795 [ Access provided at 2 Oct 2021 04:52 GMT with no institutional affiliation ] THEATRE REVIEWS 491 at BAM and should reconsider their casting policy. “The best actor for the role” remains sound advice, whether one’s accent chimes “theater” or “theatuh.” For this late romance, in particular, dissonance is structurally endemic. Nothing is gained by the addition of harsher discords or more unpleasant sharps. n Twelfth Night Presented by the Donmar West End Company at the Wyndham’s Theatre, London. December 5, 2008–March 7, 2009. Directed by Michael Grandage. Set and Costumes by Christopher Oram. Lighting by Neil Austin. Musical Composition by Julian Philips. Sound by Fergus O’Hare. Fights by Terry King. With Mark Bonnar (Orsino), Norman Bowman (Curio), James Howard (Valentine), Victoria Hamilton (Viola), Ian Drysdale (Sea Captain, Priest), Ron Cook (Sir Toby Belch), Samantha Spiro (Maria), Guy Henry (Sir An- drew Aguecheek), Zubin Varla (Feste), Indira Varma (Olivia), Derek Jacobi (Malvolio), Lloyd Hutchinson (Antonio) and Alex Waldman (Sebastian). Christian M. Billing, University of Hull Alice. I know what men want. Dan. Really? Alice. Oh yes. Dan. Tell me… Alice. Considers Men want a girl who looks like a boy. Patrick Marber Closer Act I Scene ii. This production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night formed part of the Donmar West End 2008–2009 season, in which Artistic Director Mi- chael Grandage sought to take productions of “great drama at affordable prices to the heart of [London’s] West End.” The season also aimed at taking the company’s work to larger audiences than those possible in the heavily subsidized but relatively small Donmar Warehouse in Covent Garden. As a result of the concomitant need to guarantee good box of- fice receipts for the venture, each of the season’s four plays was cast (and marketed) as a star-driven vehicle, with Kenneth Branagh taking the lead in Ivanov, Judi Dench in Madame de Sade, Derek Jacobi in Twelfth Night, and Jude Law in Hamlet. Performances took place in the Wyndham’s Theatre—a 759-seat venue first opened in 1899 and fully refurbished in Louis XVI style in 2008. 08_27.3theatre_reviews.indd 491 8/20/09 10:33:36 AM 492 SHAKESPEARE BULLETIN Christopher Oram’s scenography laid out the scene well before the play began. The setting consisted of a series of elegant, tall, louvered doors in distressed wood tones, which formed both an upstage wall and a set of Serlian side wings allowing for entrances and exits. The stage floor was made up of planks in distressed wood, with light lime-wash applied and false beams projecting from underneath the downstage edges to resemble ship’s decking. This floor surface broke up as it jutted into the auditorium, suggesting shipwreck. Beginning with a blackout, followed by thunder and lightning, 1.1 began not with the usual drooping Orsino, lamenting in melancholy tones the insufficiency of music as a permanent capturer of heartache, but rather with a raging Duke battling against the elements like a young Lear. As Oram’s louvered doors opened center stage and flew out, the scene transformed to a beach, post-storm, and a substantial cyclorama provided the skyline background to Viola and the Sea Captain doing their own expository scene-setting. Viola (Victoria Hamilton, an actor recently de- scribed, to her embarrassment, as “her generation’s Judi Dench”) entered in a turquoise-bodiced dress with blue chiffon and taffeta skirts and a train much like a wedding dress (signifying, perhaps, the play’s inevitable marital telos, but also evocative of a mermaid’s tail, pointing to the watery subtext of Shakespeare’s darkest comedy). As performance continued, it became clear that Grandage and Oram intended to do much of the work of characterization through costume- related stereotypes; for Olivia and Malvolio this correlated largely to issues of class and confinement; but the technique was also evident in characters such as Sir Toby, whose first entrance saw the depraved lush arrive (on a stage lit to look as if it were midday) in white-tie evening dress, complete with party streamers around his neck. Feste likewise had his intellectual independence and rejection of the norms of his counter- parts’ society signified through a rag-patchwork cloak costume that made the balding, short-haired actor look like a European traveling hippie— complete with a distressed Spanish guitar, slung casually over his shoul- der. Although some costume choices spoke to particular periods, there was no overall consistency of setting to the production, ether temporal or geographical—and some of its quirkier design decisions led one to wonder just where Grandage’s Illyria was. This was particularly so in pre- scene additions such as that before 1.4. (a fencing-school scene between Valentine and Cesario) in which bizarre Spanish flamenco dancing took place in a shaft of open white light upstage right, and after which the audience was treated to slow tango-inspired dancing set to Andalucían 08_27.3theatre_reviews.indd 492 8/20/09 10:33:36 AM Victoria Hamilton (foreground) as Cesario and Mark Bonnar (background) as Orsino in the Donmar West End 2009 production of Twelfth Night, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo courtesy of Manuel Harlan and the Donmar West End Company. 08_27.3theatre_reviews.indd 493 8/20/09 10:33:36 AM 494 SHAKESPEARE BULLETIN music—evidence not only of the production’s mixture of trans-historical dress and lack of geographical specificity, but also of its sometimes im- penetrable symbolism. For 1.5, Malvolio and Olivia wore elegant late-Victorian/early- Edwardian mourning/morning dress, Malvolio with a high wing collar that helped visually to reinforce his stuffy demeanor (a facet of perfor- mance supported by Jacobi’s over-pronouncing in very plummy RP). Jacobi’s physicality was also well maintained throughout these opening scenes; he walked and stood as if a rectally inserted ramrod ran from his colon to his cranium—a physical stance that went well with his outmoded costuming. Strangely, however, little attempt was made to masculinize Viola as Cesario. No effort, for example, was taken to hide Victoria Hamilton’s shirt-covered bosom when she played the boy; indeed, the actor’s chest even seemed augmented by the Bordeaux and gold-braided cummerbund she wore over her often-open-necked blue Hussar’s jacket. Cesario also wore military trousers with a generous female bottom cut, which again seemed somewhat to (over-) emphasize the capacious back- side of this production’s “Viola beneath.” The poor (or perhaps deliber- ately conservative) costume choice was most jarring in the first Cesario scene, when “his” ensemble (together with a wig that made Hamilton look like a well-coiffured 1940s Vogue cover-girl) created a strong female look that called into question the audience’s acceptance of Cesario as male on any level. Fortunately, however, it was Olivia’s corporality and costuming that quickly took and held center stage from the moment Varma uttered: “we will draw the curtain and show you the picture.” Prior to this, Olivia wore a veil that not only covered her face and torso, but reached down to the Roman-style couch on which she sat. The thin cloth added verti- cal substance to the heavy folds of Olivia’s black dress, creating a serene, distanced, sculptural quality. When it was lifted, and Varma rose, the au- dience saw that she wore beneath her veil a sexy, off-the-shoulder, tight- bodiced dress with heavy bustle. As her flesh was revealed, the slender architecture of Varma’s shoulder line and upper torso, her heavy black eye- brows, and her black hair falling over pale shoulders were sonnet-inspiring stuff. Subtly, the audience were invited to consider the inappropriate and constrictive trap-pings of class and mourning in which this beautiful and desirable young woman had encased herself. At the same time (once Varma’s face had been made visible), one of the actor’s most famous roles (Niobe, wife of Lucius Vorenus, in the BBC/HBO collaboration Rome) came to the forefront of my mind and served to augment Varma/ 08_27.3theatre_reviews.indd 494 8/20/09 10:33:36 AM Indira Varma (left) as Olivia, Zubin Varla (center) as Feste and Derek Jacobi (right) as Malvolio in the Donmar West End 2009 production of Twelfth Night, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo courtesy of Hugo Glendinning and the Donmar West End Company. Derek Jacobi (foreground) as Malvolio with Guy Henry as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, Samantha Spiro as Maria and Ron Cook as Sir Toby Belch (back- ground) in the Donmar West End 2009 production of Twelfth Night, directed by Michael Grandage. Photo courtesy of Hugo Glendinning and the Donmar West End Company. 08_27.3theatre_reviews.indd 495 8/20/09 10:33:37 AM 496 SHAKESPEARE BULLETIN Olivia’s beauty; this meta-performative interplay that was evidently not lost on designer Christopher Oram, whose nod to Varma’s fame in this role was made clear by his placing a piece of specifically Roman furniture center-stage. Varma was the visual and thematic heart of acts one and two because she stayed center stage on her classical couch during the entirety of the Sebastian/Olivia proxy-wooing scene and (provocatively, given her textual absence from them) subsequent scenes between Antonio and Sebastian, and Malvolio and Cesario (2.1 and 2.2). During the latter, Varma watched the dialogue intently but was always herself the center of attention, not least because she was not merely spoken of, but illuminated in shafts of open white down-light generated by fifteen spotlights whose beams were picked out in mister-haze, gently propelled into the upper half of the proscenium.