Twelfth Night
Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Peter Hall
At the National Theatre Cottesloe, London
A review by M. D. Ball of the performance on Jan. 27, 2011
There's no such thing as the definitive Shakespeare production. Each play is almost an embarrassment of riches that raises too many questions and too many implications for any single interpretation to satisfy. And like the four centuries that have passed since he wrote the play, this production of Twelfth Night by the National Theatre bears witness to that endless stream of possibilities.
Twelfth Night shows us the consequences of disregarding the golden mean. What begins as harmless excess hardens into obsession or addiction, which in turn creates illusions or feeds existing ones. The play is set in Illyria, an imaginary land that shares its name with an ancient region in southeastern Europe, on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea. Excess and illusion flourish in Illyria. Duke Orsino claims to be in love with young Countess Olivia, who, recently bereaved at the loss of her brother, has forsworn suitors. In the second scene, we meet Viola, whom a shipwreck has delivered to Illyria's shores, and who, having lost contact with him, believes her twin brother, Sebastian, to be dead. She decides to disguise herself as a young male page, takes the name "Cesario", and enters the Duke's service, who then employs Cesario as an intermediary with the Countess. Olivia, however, falls in love with Cesario, even while Cesario (Viola) has fallen in love with Orsino.
Meanwhile, Sir Toby Belch, Olivia's uncle, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, a fatuous squire, have been getting drunk and disturbing the peace of Olivia's house by singing loudly well into the night. For this transgression, Malvolio, Olivia's steward, chides them. They decide to take revenge on Malvolio by making him believe that he's the object of Olivia's secret affections. Maria, a lady-in-waiting for Olivia, writes to Malvolio a love letter in her mistress' hand, asking him to wear yellow stockings with cross-garters, to be rude to the other servants, and to smile constantly in Olivia's presence. Malvolio gladly complies, but his strange behavior leads Olivia to believe him insane. His tormentors carry the cruel joke further by locking him up in a dark cellar, while the jester Feste mocks him. Malvolio swears vengeance but the Duke sends Fabian, a gentleman of Olivia's house, to pacify him. Finally, Sebastian arrives. Mistaking him for Cesario (Viola), Olivia asks him to marry her; they're secretly united. Eventually, when the twins appear together before both Orsino and Olivia, everything suddenly makes sense. The Duke and Viola are to be married, while Sir Toby and Maria reveal that they already are.
False love exists in Illyria even before the storm drops Viola into the action. Despite claiming to be in love with Olivia, Orsino is actually in love with being in love. However, Marton Csokas seems to have thought otherwise; he brought an illogical, antagonistic darkness to the role of Orsino, a cynicism that rightly belonged to the jester and that sucked the beauty out of Orsino's lines in the opening scene. He had less the heart of a romantic and more the liver of a narcissist -- and a mildly malevolent one at that. Inasmuch as anger was the overarching emotion that Csokas infused into his Orsino, it was difficult to detect any love at all in the man, let alone any poetic sensibility; therefore, understanding Viola's affection for him stretched one's reason and imagination. The other performances had to compensate for the dour tone that Csokas set early on.
Olivia's illusion runs parallel to Orsino's. She loves grief more than she honors her brother's memory. Like Csokas, though, Amanda Drew surprised me with a dissonant characterization. Hers was sometimes inconsistent with grief by being light, or inconsistent with illusion by being theatrical. So, was she misinterpreting Olivia by overlooking her addiction to grief? Or was she fashioning an Olivia who indulged her false love by forcibly exaggerating her mannerisms? I don't know, of course, but neither possibility fulfills Olivia's function in this play as a creature of excess.
But there's no subtlety in the excesses of Sir Toby Belch, played in this production by Simon Callow. Through the three B's -- bluster, bombast, and bellowing -- Callow's Sir Toby cut a swath of recklessness and irresponsibility across Illyria and across this production. Though extravagant, his performance was natural, and it never failed to freshen what was happening on stage. This Sir Toby was an obnoxious drunk who not only made Shakespeare's point about too-much-of-a-good-thing but also provided a strong contrast for his colleagues to exploit in their own characterizations.
Simon Paisley Day portrayed the hapless steward with Puritan tendencies, Malvolio, whose sin of excess lies in his religious zeal. Because that zeal turns out to be a conceit that balloons into hypocrisy, it imposes an extreme in the other direction, a deficiency, in abstinence from anything pleasurable. As Aristotle explains in Book II of his Nicomachean Ethics, "...a man who revels in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while he who avoids every pleasure like a boor becomes what might be called insensitive. Thus, we see that self-control...[is] destroyed by excess and by deficiency and are preserved by the mean." The stoicism that Day's Malvolio showed was engagingly funny, but even funnier was the metamorphosis of his countenance as that stoicism yielded to his baser instincts. In fact, the relationship between this Malvolio and his mistress could have passed for satire of that between Felton and Milady de Winter in Dumas' The Three Musketeers. Malvolio's transformation, along with his subsequent humiliation, carved out what may have been the best performance of the evening, although David Ryall's Feste was perhaps equally interesting. His Feste was eerily cryptic; one had the sense that this perspicacious jester enjoyed his bitterness and cruelty, even while resigning himself to universal derision. What seemed absent, however, was melancholy, which is usually Feste's claim to excess.
Playing Viola (Cesario) was Rebecca Hall, in whose performance irony abounded. With extremes all around her, Viola represents the golden mean, the balance point at which the ancient Greeks' three elements of beauty -- symmetry, proportion, and harmony -- coalesce. As the only character not given to excess, Hall's Viola was actually somewhat boring, raising the obvious question about whether this speaks to Hall's acting or to the nature of the golden mean. I prefer the former explanation because the latter implies a disappointing contradiction, namely, that beauty can also be dull. There's a third possibility, though: that Hall's delivery was intentionally flat so as to distinguish Viola from the crowd. But Aristotle doesn't argue that living at the mean entails never moving from it; rather, he says that the goal is to find the balance between the excesses and deficiencies. Such a balance is not what Hall achieved in this role.
The subtext of confinement in this play is an inconsistent one because its success depends on the staging. Gender roles are restrictive, of course, and the sex-specific clothing, cross-dressing, and cross-gartering in this production were all quite effective. But the symbolism of confinement, such as the feeling of being boxed in, was missing. Emotions, like heat waves and light beams, were free to escape the stage without colliding with each other and charging the atmosphere. Consequently, the energy level in this production was lower than it could, should, or would have been had the set been designed to suggest close quarters.
Twelfth Night is a 17th-century lesson for 21st-century people who have tethered themselves to extremes. And there are many such people and many such extremes. Whereas Illyria's denizens struggle with emotions and abstractions, which are intangible, modern technology has created a whole new category of excesses, tangible excesses, in the form of gadgets that Shakespeare couldn't presage. Although balance is restored in this play at the end, and happiness descends on Illyria, the bard shows us that temporary imbalance or disorder is sometimes necessary to bring people back to their senses. What he doesn't tell us is how long that process might take.