Life's Hard

Twelfth Night
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Observer

At the Stratford main house is a Twelfth Night that takes its title seriously. The first half is played against a bare and wintry treescape; at the height of the carousal scene Sir Andrew hangs up a paper-chain, which Malvolio, his puritanism outraged by such fripperies, promptly dislodges. We return from the interval, though, to find that spring has arrived; it seems to have taken the Illyrian tailors a couple of months to deliver Malvolio his yellow stockings. 

Terry Hands’s production trips itself up in other ways. Feste—acting presumably as Lord of Misrule—oversees every scene; but why then should he, like everyone else, get the twins mixed up? And the lovesick absurdities of Orsino and Olivia are, not for the first time at Stratford, overplayed. Kate Nicholls’s Olivia, emerging from behind a yashmak into unrestrained flapperhood, is a brave and intermittently delightful performance, but no actress should be required to giggle and gesticulate quite so often. 

But there are virtues, and these become more apparent as the evening proceeds. One is Jane Downs’s Maria, never quite sure of herself with Willoughby Goddard’s heartless Sir Toby and most touchingly crushed when the news of their marriage is greeted with laughter by the juvenile leads—those who, according to the peculiar class-structure of comedy, think love their own prerogative. Another is Cherie Lunghi’s Viola, no revelation but charming nonetheless. Above all there is John Woodvine’s Malvolio, who makes more of the man’s convictions than any I have seen. 

His natural enmity with Feste (Geoffrey Hutchings) crackles with unusual force; so do his dreams of humiliating his ‘kinsman Toby.’ Olivia’s letter upsets his whole scene of values; ‘I will smile’ is a grimly desperate statement of intent, whose achievement fully deserves its round of applause. The antic scene is, physically and mentally, the most daring in my experience; at the end, the Puritan again, he can utter his last line as a serious threat to everyone on stage: a threat which, as has been remarked before, history was to vindicate. This is a serious, foursquare and supremely funny performance