Authors: William Shakespeare
Twelfth Night (22 page)
a pop-art playground complete with jokey lurid green carpet for the garden box-hedge. It’s overhung by a day-glo blue arc, on top of which sits an orb that travels a day’s length from west to east and sun to moon during the play’s course.
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The design … often seemed to take the 1950s (perhaps as perceived through
Carry On
films) as its historical cue … the production was, in short, bold, brash and cartoon-like.
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Michael Billington referred to it as “a kind of pop-art Alice in Illyria with little emotional reality or erotic tension.”
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Although entertaining, it annoyed critics with its gimmickries. Also, by playing up the comic aspects, Noble lost the poetry of the play. Dimension and depth were lost in the interpretation of the characters. The program notes reduced them to types found in an enneagram report,
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and illustrated them with exaggerated and grotesque caricatures:
Twelfth Night
is the darkest and most haunting of Shakespeare’s great comedies, its humour constantly shadowed by cruelty and a keen awareness of mortality. Here, however the
poetry is almost entirely missing and you are left with little more than crude, one-dimensional farce.
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Noble’s production was a reaction against the type of
Twelfth Night
that had emerged since the 1960s, a conscious lampooning of the Chekhovian take on the play which began with John Barton’s production in 1969. The effect of treating the characters as purely comic creations, however, was revealing in the failure of these productions to make you
feel
. It appears that the comedy, inherent in Shakespeare’s text, comes from the characters themselves and is most effective when actors play the characters straight. Judi Dench, who played Viola in 1969, remarked: “John Barton was the one who said it’s such a bittersweet play, that if you do that [i.e. play it purely for comedy] it tips over. It’s not pure comedy.”
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As academic and theater historian Ralph Berry explains,
a taste for dark comedy has long been prevalent … the entire network of assumptions sustaining the old
Twelfth Night
has collapsed. And that raises the whole question of what is called, for want of a better word, comedy … A modern production of
Twelfth Night
is obliged to redefine comedy, knowing always that its ultimate event is the destruction of a notably charmless bureaucrat.
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But, he goes on to ask, “Do we laugh at it?”
There is a great deal in
Twelfth Night
about madness … for all its comedy and charm, [it is] very much darker than that. Like so many of Shakespeare’s plays, it’s about what happens to individuals when their idea of themselves prevents them from taking in the reality of the world around them. They act irrationally, lose their sense of proportion, become—in a way—unbalanced.
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Orsino is a victim of a type of madness to which the most admirable characters are sometimes subject. Its usual causes
are boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination, and the victim is unaware that he is in love with love rather than with a person.
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Orsino’s complete lack of reason with regard to Olivia’s refusal of him has been emphasized in more recent years. Michael Boyd’s 2005 production had him in various states of disarray and undress, in a half-waking, half-sleeping state, indulging his every “romantic” whim, at the expense of his personal musicians, who had to get up and play music whenever he dictated. At one point they appear in dressing gowns, obviously dragged out of bed to perpetuate his obsessive sickness. Clearly unbalanced at the start of the play, his fantasy became so overwhelming that, in the final scene, he threatened to murder both Olivia and Viola. The question of whether or not he had regained his sanity remained ambiguous.
This emphasis on the madness of Orsino’s wooing threw light on the fact that his behavior and romantic posturing is as forced as that of Malvolio. Faced with Viola/Cesario, who expresses her true feelings for Orsino through her entreaties, Olivia is awoken by a genuine note of true love. One of the play’s ironies is that the man who is most sure of himself and most grounded in reality, Malvolio, is the one who is treated as insane.
In 1987 Bill Alexander wanted to emphasize the “madness” of all the characters, and his set and lighting plots played an integral part in this:
I wanted to stress in my production some of the links between love and madness … to show people behaving in ways that are extreme, or deluded, or uncharacteristic—slightly “touched” perhaps … I wanted a sense of the intense Mediterranean heat that can go to people’s heads. So the stage set was rather like a Greek island—white-washed houses, bright blue skies … And the lighting was deliberately strong when people’s behaviour was at its most illogical.
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The whitewashed walls of the set and the intense white lighting, specifically plotted for moments of “deranged” behavior, also
encouraged a visual association with the white walls of a padded cell. This focus on madness was pursued to the end with a disturbing conclusion for Malvolio. Antony Sher, who played the part, “initially presented him as a figure of broad comedy, then showed the character degenerating through appalling suffering into real madness”:
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[Malvolio] gives the impression of groping around in the darkness while his voice is amplified to suggest a hollow cellar … [he] is tied to a stake like a bear and he whirls round it like some mad animal. At the end of the scene, he presses Olivia’s crumpled letter against his cheek, with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face. This is an extremely powerful scene, which suggests, in a pathetic way, that the borderline between the light abuses of festive misrule and real madness has now become an extremely thin one.
When Malvolio reappears on stage at the end, he is totally bedraggled and, red-eyed, tries to shield his sight from the recovered daylight. But after Feste has once more taunted him with the whirligig of time speech, Malvolio says the expected “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” in a curiously slow way that ends in a singsong. When he goes away, with a strange smile on his face, one understands that the joke has really been pushed too far and that he has become truly mad.
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Both this production and Michael Boyd’s 2005 production made use of light inspired by the scenic device used in the play
Black Comedy
by Peter Shaffer, which takes place in the darkness:
instead of playing it in darkness, you actually put light on the stage. So what the audience sees are people behaving as though it were completely dark … Instead of dimming the whole stage, we would flood a certain area of it with dazzlingly bright light to delineate the dark room. Both Feste and Malvolio would have their eyes open. But it would be clear to the audience from the very first moment—by the way that they moved around the stage—that neither of them was able to see a thing.
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[Michael Boyd] plays the dungeon scene in a blaze of light. Thus we don’t strain to catch the sound of Malvolio’s
de profundis
, but hear it and see it full-on as the rope-tethered Richard Cordery angrily prowls the stage like a captive wild animal.
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2.
Bill Alexander production, 1987: Antony Sher as Malvolio, “tied to a stake like a bear … presses Olivia’s crumpled letter against his cheek with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face.”
This being comedy rather than tragedy, the accusations of madness are usually uncovered before the characters are seriously injured, although we wonder just how far Maria and Sir Toby would have been willing to go in pursuing their “sport” to the upshot, without the self-serving interests that hold them back. Donald Sinden, who played Malvolio in 1969, believed that his degradation left him no option but suicide: “All his dignity has gone, everything he stood for has disintegrated, what is there left for him to do? Nothing … I saw it as a very tragic ending … Malvolio’s a man without any sense of humor, and therefore, a tragic man.”
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In Shakespeare’s canon, the handling of Malvolio’s torture is undoubtedly one of the most difficult scenes for a director to stage. The absurdity of the situation may have its own inherent humor, but it is a bitter and dark one, especially when we think of the usual Elizabethan treatment of the insane: in Romeo’s words, “Shut up in prison, kept without food, whipped and tormented”; Rosalind, on the madness of love, mentions “a dark house and whip” as a cure. In Elizabethan times it was the general belief that mad people were mad because they were “possessed” by the devil or some evil spirit. An attempt was made by a priest or “conjuror” to exorcize the devil. If this failed, as it usually did, the poor unfortunate would be manacled and chained to the wall of a bare, dark cell, beaten or whipped to their senses. The cruelty of the prank on Malvolio can often elicit an uncomfortable response, and modern productions rarely let the audience off the hook. Do we laugh at it? That is a factor entirely dependent on the choices that the director makes.
Gender confusion stands at the very heart of the amorous adventures and comic love-plots in the drama of the age of Shakespeare. The confusion starts from the fact that on the
Jacobean stage all the marriageable young women’s parts in plays like
Twelfth Night
and
As You Like It
were written to be played by boys … Boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys, and (on stage) boys dressed as girls dressed as boys, all apparently add to the delicious pleasure of the erotic chase. Outside the close confines of marital love, family and reproduction, gender-bending is the name of the game—“as you like it,” or “what you will.”
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The influential Polish critic Jan Kott asserted that “Illyria is a country of erotic madness.”
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As evident as it may seem to a modern audience, this aspect had not been explored until the 1970s.
Peter Gill’s sexually charged revival in 1974 was dominated by a large image of Narcissus—“a continuous reminder to the audience of the themes of ambiguous sexuality and erotic self-deception”:
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All are intoxicated with their own reflections, and the function of Viola and Sebastian is to put them through an Ovidian obstacle course from which they learn to turn away from the mirror and form real attachments.
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There is nothing at all equivocal about the physical relationships. Orsino hugs Cesario to his breast with rapturous abandon: Antonio is plainly Sebastian’s long time boy friend: and Viola all but tears her hair in anguish at Olivia’s unfulfilled passion for her.
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Demonstrative physical contact pointed to the nature of the developing relationships. As Orsino sat listening to music, lounging on cushions, Viola/Cesario sat between his legs. On his asking Cesario if he had ever been in love, they playfully rolled around:
The Duke is young and lolls about panting and sighing, half-dressed, a sexy man, all male comradely affection with his courtiers, arms around them, head on shoulders on the huge Habitat cushions. And among them, Viola, small, white and utterly frozen as he fondles her/him while he talks about this
other love—frozen not just with horror but with tense, deliberately fraught repression.
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Jane Lapotaire played a very boyish Cesario. She said, “Viola takes her boyhood very seriously—she has to in order to survive.”
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Olivia’s reaction to the reunion of Sebastian and Viola was comical. Wardle described her as “licking her lips at the sight of the interchangeably delicious twins”: “her ‘Most wonderful!’ brought the house down. On ‘Cesario, come!’ Orsino caught the wrong twin. Olivia as she moved away with Sebastian, looked back half wistfully at Viola, perhaps wishing that it were after all possible to have both.”
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It was not until 2001 that such an overtly sexual reading was revisited: Lindsay Posner “cleverly locates his production in the Edwardian age of uncertainty, when young feminists and suffragettes were derided as unwomanly and dandyish male aesthetes reckoned no better than effeminate”:
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Orsino’s caressing of Cesario’s head as they listen to the “food of love” seems far from blameless. When we first meet Sebastian, Viola’s long-lost twin, he’s getting himself together after a romp on a large bed with Antonio … the butch black sailor who’s plucked him from the waves. Can this really be the Sebastian who will resolve all by taking Cesario’s place in Olivia’s bed and maybe even in her affections? As for Matilda Ziegler’s simpering Sloane of an Olivia, the kiss she plants on Viola in the denouement suggests the root cause of her trouble was that her real taste had always been for laddish lasses in uniform. Much of this is amusing enough … but the rather tactless outing of sexual ambivalence undermines the subtlety of Shakespeare’s own games with the chemistry of love.
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