Twelfth Night

Synopsis

Or What You Will. Shakespeare comedy of mistaken identity, practical jokes and unrequited love. Rescued from a shipwreck the twins Viola and Sebastian arrive independently in Illyria, both thinking the other is drowned. Viola disguises herself as a boy and finds employment with the Duke who is in love with Olivia. Malvolio is the subject of a cruel joke played on him by Sir Toby Belch (yellow stockings cross-gartered) leading him to believe that Olivia loves him. But Olivia has fallen in love with the disguised Viola, while she is in love with the Duke (following it so far?!).

Our Review:

12 September 2007

Questions about identity run through director Neil Bartlett's work like the word 'Blackpool' through a stick of rock. Eight years ago his production of Marivaux's The Dispute at the RSC’s Other Place, examined the issue of nature versus nurture, so, on paper at least, Twelfth Night or What you Will, seems tailor-made for him.

In practice, however, the production, which boasts a star appearance by US comic actor John Lithgow as Malvolio, falls disappointingly flat, prompting uncomfortable memories of Lindsay Posner's drear outing here six years ago. Like Posner, Bartlett sets the play in Edwardian England. Like Posner, Bartlett manages to lose most of the laughter en route in his "exploration of sexual ambiguity," as the RSC remarked at the time.

Bartlett acknowledges the artifice of the evening from the off. Feste, sat behind a grand piano, announces the start of proceedings which take place on a thrust stage marked out with flickering lig...

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