>>REVIEW
TWELFTH NIGHT
Runs until July 21
The Shakespeare Company
(Pumphouse Park)
About halfway through last Friday’s performance of Twelfth Night, the tanned American senior seated behind me leaned over her companion’s lawn chair, indicating the actress at centre stage. "That gal is really having fun," she announced.
The "gal" was Iam Coulter, infectiously exuberant in the role of Maria, a serving maid. Coulter’s Maria doesn’t just "enter" her scenes, as per Shakespeare’s stage directions – she literally runs, beginning from behind the audience and skirting its side, a great, mischievous grin on her face all the while. The near-exact repetition of this entrance every time is a winning comic device, and it serves to both catch the audience up in Maria’s energy and to make us complicit in the tricks she and her cohorts perform.
It’s only fitting that Coulter’s character should so capture the spirit of the play, since Coulter herself is also its director. That she manages to convey such a sense of carefree fun while mantling the responsibility for a complex production might just be sleight of hand, but I doubt it. The sense of fun pervades the evening, and it’s clearly a matter the entire cast takes very seriously. This is, after all, the play that ends with the fool, Feste, one of Shakespeare’s great self-conscious commentators on art, proclaiming: "we’ll strive to please you every day."
As with many of Shakespeare’s comedies, the plot and its players can be roughly divided into two camps: romantic and comic. But it’s a great strength of Twelfth Night that these strains interact much more meaningfully than in many of the plays. To begin with, the romantic, Duke Orsino (played with delightful self-importance by Justin Michael Carriere) is lovesick for countess Olivia (a vibrant Emma Claire Miller). Olivia, though, falls madly in love with the mysterious young man Orsino sends to woo her on his behalf. The young man is, in fact, a woman, Viola (Rachel Gilliatt), who, along with her twin brother Sebastian, was recently lost at sea. And the crossed-dressed Viola is herself in love with the Duke.
A typically baroque Shakespearean comic plot, to be sure, whose twists and turns are matched by the complexity of its extended-mix puns. The cast, though, keeps afloat. The action is almost never confusing, and a great deal of the credit for this must go to Coulter’s meticulous direction. She has wisely culled a few parts from the dramatis personae, keeping things to essentials. Stage business and clever blocking elucidate the action without distracting from it. And it’s often hilarious: a scene in which three characters hide behind a tree is a lesson in how even the broadest comedy can be art.
The only minus-column entry is that some of the cast’s speeches are eclipsed by the clatter and roar of passing trains and airplanes, particularly in the case of the soft-voiced Gilliatt (appropriate for her role, by the way – to quote one of the bard’s more obvious bawdy puns, her "small pipe/Is as the maiden’s organ"). But, occasional clamour aside, it’s hard to imagine a lovelier, more intimate setting for Shakespeare than Pumphouse Park.
Twelfth Night likely refers to Feast of the Epiphany, often coupled in Renaissance times with the Feast of Fools, a wild celebration of the world turned upside-down. Such revels traditionally had a Lord of Misrule, and in Twelfth Night, that honour undoubtedly belongs to Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s perennially partying uncle. More than any other character, Sir Toby embodies the mischievous, even anarchic spirit of the play. Fortunately, Stuart James is more than up to the task: his Sir Toby could give life to a party of corpses. His partners in crime, however, are anything but that. A standout here is Cliff Kelly’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek, another suitor (and a hopeless one) of Olivia. Kelly plays Sir Andrew with a stiff-legged, empty-headed dandyism, an effective foil for Sir Toby’s earthier, intelligent buffoonery.
It’s such a roomy play. Just as comic, but with significant darker notes, are Feste, the fool and, of course, Olivia’s misanthropic steward Malvolio. Dan Perry gives Feste a poker-faced "seen-it-all" quality – his melancholy songs, drawing from Shakespeare’s words but composed by Perry himself, wouldn’t sound out of place on an alt-folk stage and yet seem perfectly in place here. Malvolio – one of the great character parts in theatre – is equally well cast. Janos Zeller captures the villain’s deep discontentment and pitiful vulnerability, yet loses no opportunity to mug with the best of them when it’s Malvolio’s time to shine in the comic spotlight.
Coulter’s director’s notes tell us that her "least favourite productions of Twelfth Night are those that begin to lose themselves in the melancholy of the play." This production lets the darker elements – such as the treatment of Malvolio and Sir Andrew – speak for themselves, rather than browbeating us with their import. The result is a riotous midsummer night’s entertainment. And the dark sides of the idyll do linger long in the memory, just as, if I may dare to speculate, Shakespeare intended. |
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