Twelfth Night
Wyndham's Theatre Winter 2008-2009

Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (the one about the girl who dresses as a boy, only to have a woman fall for her) is a deceptively difficult play to do right.

Its mix of romance, comedy, whimsy and pathos is a lot more fragile than you'd guess, and it always, always defeats the Royal Shakespeare Company, bringing out all that is ponderous in the house style.

Which makes Michael Grandage's production for the Donmar-in-the-West-End a special delight. Grandage has found the secret to making the play work, which is just to stay out of its way and not try to impose a concept on it or to gild the lily with extra funny stuff.

Yes, the production is in vaguely modern dress, and yes, there are a couple of harmlessly unnecessary bits of staging, like a dancing class for Orsino's all-male household or a scene set on the beach. But there's no attempt to twist the play into being about homoeroticism or the rise of capitalism or colonial imperialism or the Iraq War or anything else.

Grandage and his uniformly excellent cast just (just!) use all their talents to serve the play, letting a far greater artist than any of them carry the evening.

And carry it he does. The play makes you laugh a lot, sigh a little and perhaps even think a bit. It flows smoothly from romance to character comedy to farce to melodrama and back, without a hitch.

I can remember isolated moments from other productions that were briefly funnier or more touching, but no other version that had such consistency and high quality throughout. And the key on just about every level is not getting in the way of the play.

As Viola, the one whose disguise not only attracts Olivia but keeps her from being able to declare her love for Orsino (who's in love with Olivia), Victoria Hamilton captures all the innocence and purity of the romantic heroine, along with an attractive youthfulness that makes it all, despite her frustrations, a bit of a girl's-own-adventure for her.

In too many productions Olivia is reduced to straightman and feed for the others, but Indira Varma finds all the humour in this prim puritan suddenly finding herself feeling randy. It is Mark Bonnar who makes the sacrifice of being straightman by playing Orsino with no knowledge that he's in a comedy, thus generously letting everyone else shine around him.

The role of Malvolio, the stuffy steward who's made the butt of a complex practical joke, has traditionally been the purview of a serious classical actor on holiday, with a lot of the fun being watching such a figure let his acting hair down, even though that often means someone who is not a natural clown working too hard and too visibly at being funny.

Derek Jacobi has all the right serious credentials, but he also has a comic sensibility, and can find the gags without having to force them. The result is a more restrained comic performance than some Malvolios offer, but a more coherent one - Jacobi is certainly the first Malvolio I've seen who could make you laugh out loud but still exit the play with some dignity remaining.

Meanwhile, absurdly tall Guy Henry and moderately short Ron Cook turn Aguecheek and Toby Belch into a walking sight gag, and hardly have to work to be funny - the characters benefiting doubly by never descending from recognisable human frailties and follies into cartoons.

And while it is not true, as some may suspect, that Shakespeare's verbal comedy is always drearily unfunny, discretion may be the better part of valour, and Zubin Varla as Feste wisely zips through the puns and wordplay, letting the character be defined and carried by his several songs.

If you have seen Twelfth Night before, then, like me, you will probably have seen isolated moments done better than they're played here. But I am sure you will not have seen a production so of a piece at such a high level of entertainment. And if you haven't seen it before, this is an ideal introduction.

Gerald Berkowitz

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Review - Twelfth Night - Wyndham's 2008