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by William Shakespeare, directed by Des McAnuff

Stratford Shakespeare Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

July 15-October 28, 2011

“Twelfth Night - The Musical”

The Stratford Shakespeare Festival’s latest production of Twelfth Night is breathtakingly superficial.  An extreme example of directorial indifference, Des McAnuff’s interest in the play does not extend beyond its first line.  He turns the play’s many songs into such production numbers that they, not the story, become the play’s main focus.  Besides this, McAnuff deliberately distracts attention away from the dialogue either because he does not find it interesting or because he can’t be bothered to discover its meaning, let alone make it clear to an audience.

McAnuff takes his cue from the first line in the play (although it is not the first line in this production): “If music be the food of love, play on.”  That one line becomes one of the many songs written by Michael Roth and McAnuff that bloat the play to a running time of more than three hours.  Music is certainly important to the studied melancholy of Court Orsino, the man who speaks it, but McAnuff conveniently ignores the two lines that immediately follow: “Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting, The appetite may sicken and so die.”  Orsino asks for more music not for celebration, as McAnuff seems to think, but to cure his desire for it but by giving him so much he will tire of it.  Thus, this is hardly a well-considered rationale for a director to expand the musical portions of the play until they dominate the show--unless, of course, he intends that we, too, surfeit on it causing out appetite for the music and the play to “sicken and so die”. 

Though McAnuff claims in his Director’s Note in the programme that he has been inspired by popular music of the past sixty years, in fact his unmemorable tunes derive from the much shorter period of the late 1960s and early ‘70s when he began his career as a writer of musicals.  After Orsino’s first speech the three musicians in Beatles costumes of the Sergeant Pepper era play on whereupon a white piano floats in played by a bearded, long-haired, white-suited young man who turns around to let us know he’s supposed to be John Lennon.  This is just one of many gimmicks that make no sense.  Why mix three Sergeant Pepper Beatles with the Lennon of “Imagine”?  Quite often Feste will begin a song accompanying himself on the electric guitar only to have the “Beatles” float in on a bandstand as backup. 

The two most ridiculous uses of music are when McAnuff turns the simple catch that Feste, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew sing into a loud Beach Boys tribute and later when he turns Feste’s short song “Hey, Robin, jolly Robin” sung to the imprisoned Malvolio into a hard rock number with Feste standing on top of Malvolio’s cage with the backup band behind.  The show ends with one of Shakespeare’s loveliest songs, “When that I was and a little tiny boy”, sung by Feste to indicate that the life of celebration and surfeit is over and we must return to a world where “the rain it raineth every day.”  This is usually does as a quiet close to contrast with the series of surprising revelations that has gone before.  Not here.  McAnuff makes this song, too, into a rock anthem with the entire cast joining in, forcing a lyric about the return to cold reality to become, contrary to its lyrics, a big upbeat finale.

In his Note, McAnuff claims that Shakespeare’s plays and design in Shakespeare’s time were “postmodern” far ahead of their time because Shakespeare mixed genres in his work and the players wore modern dress.  Besides ignoring the heritage of medieval drama in Shakespeare and the fact that Elizabethans did not have the same historical sense we do, it ignores the fact that 18th-century playwrights like Voltaire and Goethe deliberately tried to move design to reflect historical periods more accurately.  Even if McAnuff thinks his production is “postmodern”, he forgets that the mix of different styles must be used not willy-nilly but to some purpose.

Design Debra Hanson has extravagantly chosen the will-nilly approach.  Her aggressively unattractive set depicts the top half of a huge carved oval wooden mirror placed over the central entrance to the stage with large shards of glass falling everywhere.  A mirror is appropriate for a play with identical twins and mistaken identities, but why is it broken?  That’s certainly not what the parallel marriages of Orsino and Olivia to the twins suggests.

For unknown reasons the men of Orsino’s court wear heavily embroidered 1960s-style Nehru jackets and jabots, while all the serving men are in 1960s black business suits.  Olivia and her women are in high Victorian garb with bustles and lace, that is until they decide to play tennis when they change into 1920s outfits.  Sir Toby and company are more diverse.  Maria remains in Elizabethan dress throughout, but Sir Toby and Sir Andrew start out in 1920s outfits when they play golf (using and electric golf cart), switch into faux-Victorian countryfolk wear in the tavern scenes and end up in 1960s suits.  What is the link between the 1920s and sport?  Who knows.  When Orsino and Viola take turns hitting baseballs launched by Orsino’s automatic pitching machine (I’m not making this up), they both stay in the 1960s.  Multiperiod costuming can be used to underscore thematic points.  Here it does not.  Olivia’s move from the 1890s to the 1920s could have been used to show her interior progress from mourning to a more open life.  But no, Hanson has her return to the 1890s right after the tennis scene and there she stays until play’s end.  The most bizarre costuming is reserved for Malvolio, who not only appears in yellow stockings and cross-gartered, but also appears only for that scene in Elizabethan garb and sporting a pleated millstone ruff so enormous is attracts attention away from his legs which should be the prime focus.

As a director McAnuff follows in the inglorious footsteps of Richard Monette, Richard Rose and Leon Rubin in direction Shakespearean comedy by adopting their throw-anything-at-the play-and see-what-sticks approach.  Therefore, in the letter scene when Malvolio utters the words “to be”, McAnuff has him adopt the Hamlet-holding-skull position.  It gets a laugh but to what point?  In the tavern scene the doorbell rings and John Lennon appears holding a square flat box.  Guess what?  He’s delivering a pizza!  This also gets a big laugh but has nothing to do with anything.  And so the action proceeds gimmick by gimmick.  Often the gimmicks contradict the text.  The imprisoned Malvolio complains about being kept in darkness, but the floor of his cage has bright lights under the frosted glass and the stage is far from dark.  All of this conveys the sense that McAnuff does not merely not trust the play alone to be successful but can’t be bothered to explore its meaning.  He can’t even make the plot clear since the scenes with Sebastian and the two sea captains are so covered by music we can’t hear what they’re saying.

McAnuff seems to have left the cast to their own devices.  Andrea Runge is an insipid Viola, virtually incapable of making sense of her lines.  She can’t seem to express more than one emotion at a time which is quite a liability with a character who is constantly torn.  Sara Topham would make a fine Olivia if she didn’t have to work constantly against the gimmicks thrown her way.  Mike Shara could also make a fine Orsino, but he does almost nothing with the role and never appears melancholy or love-struck.  

Of the below stairs crowd, Brian Dennehy is jovial as Sir Toby Belch but does not make the part his own in a way that any number of Canadian actors might.  Stephen Ouimette, however, despite having to do such nonsense as moonwalk, gives the finest performance of the evening as Sir Andrew Aguecheek.  He is a master of physical comedy and comic timing and is able to make the fool and coward that Sir Andrew is into a sympathetic figure.  Cara Ricketts is an enthusiastic but not very individual Maria, whereas Juan Chioran, clad rather like an accountant, makes Fabian into much more of a forceful character than he usually is. 

Tom Rooney and Ben Carlson do good work as Malvolio and Feste and rise above the constraints McAnuff’s gimmicks put on them.  Though Rooney does not really show enough menace as Malvolio in the early scenes, the bewilderment and quiet rage of Malvolio inside and out of confinement is quite effective.  Carlson, as usual, is an exemplar of clear diction that the younger cast members would do well to follow.  Those who did not see him in She Loves Me at the Shaw Festival in 2000, will be surprised to find what a talented singer he is in genres ranging from country to blues to ballads.  He needs no suddenly appearing backup band to give his songs weight.

In his Note McAnuff claims: “The use of deliberate discrepancy seems particularly appropriate to the world of Twelfth Night - a play whose alternative title is What You Will (or, as a teenager might say today, “Whatever”), practically dictates a postmodernist approach”.  Either McAnuff is sadly misinformed about the subtitle or wants to read it his own way.  “Will” in Elizabethan times had more force as a verb than it does now and meant “want” or “desire”.  What You Will definitely does not mean “whatever”, but a teenage “whatever” pretty well sums up how McAnuff does approach Shakespeare.  It’s ironic that a director who is a master of making the slim meaning of musicals seem weighty is only able, or willing, to make the weightier meaning of Shakespeare’s plays seem slight.                   

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Brian Dennehy, Ben Carlson and Stephen Ouimette. ©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.