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| Richard Wilson as Malvolio |
Twelfth Night (RSC)Venue:
Courtyard TheatreWhere: Stratford-Upon-Avon
Date Reviewed: 22 October 2009
WOS Rating:
Average Reader Rating:
Reader Reviews:
View and add to our user reviewsGregory Doran’s production of Twelfth Night is a thoroughly engaging, impeccably interpreted piece of theatre. The action takes place in a mercurial corner of the Ottoman Empire, before a set of breathtaking beauty and simplicity and upon a stage which lends itself equally to the public storytelling squares reminiscent of the Djemma el Fna and the courtly gardens of Duke Orsino and Countess Olivia.
The comic timing is superb. Miltos Yerolemou is an outstanding Feste, capable of managing the mercurial mood shifts and malicious intelligences of the Fool, shifting allegiances between compassion and exploitation with absolute conviction. His song "What is Love" is tender and tawdry, full of contradiction, a beguiling mix of cynicism and hope.
Pamela Nomvete, in her debut season for the Royal Shakespeare Company, is equally good as Olivia’s maid, making the transition between lady’s maid to Sir Toby’s aide with great credibility. Doran highlights the interior logic of this transition by emphasising the resentment she feels towards Malvolio when he accuses her, along with Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, of carousing in the small hours.
Richard McCabe brings out the dark possibilities of drunken Sir Toby Belch, loyal to no-one, not even his friends, thus making complete sense of the cruelty later to be visited upon Malvolio. And James Fleet is an extravagantly gawky Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The eavesdropping scene is a masterpiece, beautifully conceived and executed, with the three miscreants secreting themselves to hilarious comic effect in a box tree - ingeniously reinvented for this production.
As Olivia, Alexandra Gilbreath is magnificent, moving from grief-stricken hauteur, delivered in a beautifully modulated, richly tonal voice, through to an engagingly candid young woman, newly besotted with Cesario, suddenly alive to the possibilities of sexual adventure. The joy upon her face when against all her expectations Sebastian agrees to marry her is a moment of pure theatrical pleasure for the audience. Nancy Carroll’s performance of Viola has great candour and directness, which makes her reunion with her twin, often a shaky moment in the play’s credibility, authentically moving.
Richard Wilson’s brilliant Malvolio emphasises all the censorious loftiness of a man steeped in a puritanical understanding of his place in the world, while nevertheless longing to be considered the equal of his social (but not his moral) superiors. His vanity is palpably ridiculous, his sporting of the cross-gartered yellow stockings, and his painful attempts at a smile, truly hilarious, but his demise is undeserved and his humility in confronting the extent of his deception is genuinely chastening.
The costumes are beautiful: from Olivia’s noble Spanish mourning at the beginning of the play, taking in Sir Andrew Aguecheek’s vulgar arrangement of checks and paisleys, through to the exotic brilliance of the Turkish courtiers, the costumes and Robert Jones' set convey a great deal of information simply, which allows the action of the play and the dialogue to be rendered with grace and clarity.
There is great economy and elegance to Doran’s direction, which together with the unwaveringly sure performances make for an absolutely outstanding evening.
- Claire Steele
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