Twelfth Night at Shakespeare’s Globe – review

A sense of festivity permeates almost every aspect of Robin Belfield’s rambunctious new Twelfth Night for the Globe. Perhaps wisely given the season and the open-air setting, this Illyria is in thrall not to Christmas but to some sort of carnival, and the text is regularly punctuated by blasts of Simon Slater’s brass-heavy music and the ensemble disporting in blinding, multicoloured masks, costumes and headdresses. The jollity is the point. Subtlety is hard to convey in the wide open spaces of the Globe’s yard, and this version of one of the Bard’s most beloved titles barely bothers with it at all.

It’s a raucous, inclusive take on this familiar classic, strong on audience participation, deliberately a bit rough round the edges and sometimes very funny, but the poetry and exquisite melancholy of Shakespeare’s text go for almost nothing. The cast has been directed to mug, sashay and bawl their way through the play to such an extent that the characters feel less like real people than random assemblages of funny walks, facial tics and line deliveries ranging from flat to shrill.

There are a couple of exceptions: Pearce Quigley’s hangdog, austere Malvolio is hilarious precisely because he isn’t pushing too hard. He’s genuinely a broken man by the end, and his final “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you”, delivered through tears as he exits through the crowd, is as threatening as it is pitiful. Equally effective is Laura Hanna’s authoritative but sparkling Olivia, who convincingly transforms from grief-stricken to erotically charged, and also conveys an unusual, intriguing streak of real compassion for her humiliated manservant. Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ makes something vivid and engaging out of the contrast between heroine Viola and Cesario, her male disguise.

Turning Sir Toby Belch into Lady Belch isn’t necessarily a bad idea, but Jocelyn Jee Esien, a tremendously likeable and gifted comedian, is surprisingly muted in the role. Ian Drysdale’s Aguecheek, dressed up like a luridly coloured Edwardian dandy, fares better, but the broadness of the characterisation wears a little thin by the end. Making it explicit that Viola’s twin Sebastian (Kwami Odoom) is having a gay liaison with the captain who saved him (a nicely tormented Max Keeble) adds a certain spice to the proceedings, but makes the play’s final scenes seem even more callous than they already are.

Jean Chan’s costumes are a bizarre mash-up of modern leisurewear, African fabrics, medieval dress, and the abstract, all in eye-popping colours. It’s fascinatingly eclectic – Jos Vantyler’s Feste looks like a commedia dell’arte figure while Olivia, once she casts off her mourning garb, strides on like a glitzy reimagining of Helen of Troy – but it doesn’t quite all add up.

Belfield certainly rips through the play with commendable pace and attack, but the overall lack of subtlety or real emotion robs this entrancing comedy of much of its magic. When the majority of the characters are reduced to clownish ciphers, it’s pretty hard to care about them and that ultimately renders this Twelfth Night, for all its freewheeling irreverence and high energy revelry, a disappointingly empty experience.