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by William Shakespeare, directed by Martha Henry

Stratford Festival, Festival Theatre, Stratford

May 29-October 21, 2017

Sebastian: “A spirit I am indeed;

But am in that dimension grossly clad

Which from the womb I did participate” (Twelfth Night, Act 5)

Like Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the Stratford Festival has now presented Twelfth Night four times in the 21st century, an average of once every four years.  Unlike the present Romeo, however, the present Twelfth Night is by far the best of these four.  In 2001 Antoni Cimolino mounted a production that was all about the Greek atmosphere of Illyria and very little about the play.  In 2006 Leon Rubin concentrated on atmosphere again but this time decided Illyria was in India during the Raj.  In 2011 Des McAnuff, struck that there are so many songs in the play, decided to turn it into a musical and let the spoken side of the work fall by the wayside.  Now, at last, Martha Henry’s staging focusses on Shakespeare’s words and Shakespeare’s plot and proves that getting these right, not relocating or reconfiguring the play, is the basis of a production that will resonate with an audience.

The play, as indicated by the title, is about the end of feasting and indulgence and the return to the everyday after a period of celebration.  Duke Orsino has been indulging his melancholy over his unrequited love for Olivia for so long that it seems he is in love with longing for love.  Olivia has been mourning the death of her brother so long that it seems she is in love with mourning.  Below stairs with Olivia her kinsman Sir Toby Belch has not been indulging his emotions but merely his appetite for drink and has found a dim-witted companion to help him enjoy his indulgence.

Into this world of Illyria steps the shipwrecked Viola.  Taking on man’s clothing for the sake of safety she becomes a servant to Orsino, who employs her as a messenger between himself and Olivia.  As an unforeseen upshot Olivia falls in love with Viola and Viola falls in love with Orsino.  All that is is needed now is for Viola’s twin brother Sebastian, whom she thinks died in the wreck, to arrive in Illyria and set off a chain of misprisions that lead to a resolution.

While earlier directors such as Cimolino and Rubin have tried to depict Illyria as a specific place, Henry does not.  There was an actual land termed Illyria on the east coast of the Adriatic Sea, but after the Romans conquered that area in 168bc, the place name became generalized and by Shakespeare’s time had ceased to exist as a localizable place name.  Therefore, Shakespeare’s Illyria was to him as much a fictional country as Arcadia was to his contemporary Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86).   

To highlight the anywhereness of Illyria, Henry’s designer John Pennoyer has placed  the various groups of characters in different time periods.  Orsino and his household dress as if in the mid 18th century, with breeches, cutaway coats and wigs.  Viola and her household dress as if in the early Victorian period with floor-length gowns, lace trimmings and bustles for the women and a long black coat for Malvolio.  Viola when she first arrives with the Sea Captain is clad in traditional African wear, suggesting that is place of her origin.  Feste, however, is dressed as a modern day youth in patched burlap with a hoodie and canvas lace-up shoes. 

It is suitable for Feste as a clown and commentator on the action to appear as someone of our time and a bridge from our world to that of the play.  It is also suitable for the household of the continual mourning Olivia to be associated with Queen Victoria’s 40-year-long period of deep mourned for Prince Albert.  Only the period assigned to Orsino doesn’t suit.  The 18th century was the Age of Reason  and the Enlightenment and Orsino is a self-involved romantic and not a reasonable man.  It would have made more sense if he and his household were costumed in the Regency period that coincided with dandyism and the rise of Napoleon.

A unique feature of the design, heavily influenced by Reza Jacobs’s setting of the many songs in the play, are the placing of seven so-called “singing bowls” or “rin gongs” about the stage.  These bowls, long associated with Buddhist meditation, are tuned and played by rubbing the rim with a suede-coved wooden mallet.  The effect is the same as rubbing the rim of a water-filled wine-glass with a wet finger except deeper and louder.  Jacobs has Feste, played by Brent Carver, use these bowls to accompany each of his exquisitely written songs that blend the harmonies of both east and west, songs that Carver so beautifully sings. 

It can be no accident that Henry and Jacobs use seven of these singing bowls because such bowls are used in the meditation practices of many eastern religions and the notes of seven of the bowls are associated with the seven chakras, or centres of psychic energy in the human body.  In fact, in a form of acoustic therapy playing the bowls in succession is supposed to help realign a person’s chakras.  The main point, then, is that Henry views Feste’s role as a healer of his society.  His “Take away the fool” speech with the mourning Olivia is a sign of this as is his more compassionate role as himself the second time he visits the imprisoned Malvolio. 

The healing of the damage done by excess is the theme of the play so the use of musical instruments which happen to be associated with healing is a brilliant idea and is a wonderful uniting of music and text toward a greater aim than mere entertainment.  Singing bowls are also used to signal the beginning and ending of a significant passage of time which is exactly how they are used in the play.  Carver begins the play by resonating a bowl downstage centre and ends it in the same manner.

Henry has drawn finely detailed performances from almost the entire company.  Her greatest achievement is to make each of the three groups of characters feel so natural that they are like separate, internally coherent worlds on stage rather than the collection of entrances and exits that too many directors take as satisfactory.

Sarah Afful is an immediately sympathetic Viola, for whom employment with Orsino is a way of dealing with her sorrow at the loss of her brother.  She makes the moment when it dawns on her that Olivia loves her vivid, funny and frightening all at once.  So, too, she makes the moment when she comes so near to confessing her love for Orsino while dressed in man’s clothing.  Henry beautifully stages Viola’s duel with Aguecheek, where Viola is at first timid but gradually becomes emboldened by her success in her first-ever sword fight.

Shannon Taylor is a wonderfully refined Olivia.  Taylor gives the impression that Olivia has mourned for so long that she has become entrapped in a role of her own making.  This helps make clear why she would defend Feste’s right to make fun of her and even welcome his pointing out of her folly.  Taylor’s depiction of her realization that she is falling in love with Viola (or Cesario as she knows her) is one of the best I have ever seen.  The idea dawns across her face first as surprise, then embarrassment, then delight.

The kitchen group is all cast to strength.  Geraint Wyn Davies, who played Falstaff just last year, plays Sir Toby Belch as a later incarnation of Shakespeare’s beloved fat knight.  Lucy Peacock is a bright and witty Maria and Henry establishes early on that she and Sir Toby share a strong mutual affection.  Tom Rooney is hilarious as the clueless Sir Andrew Aguecheek, whom Sir Toby enjoys as a drinking companion as much as he enjoys ridiculing him.

Chief, of course, among Olivia’s household, is her major domo Malvolio.  Rod Beattie, famous as Walt Wingfield in Dan Needles’s Wingfield heptalogy, makes a triumphant return to the Festival in Shakespeare after an absence of 18 years.  His Malvolio is slow, deliberate and dull in both word and deed to uproarious effect.  Only he could draw out to such length Malvolio’s extremely funny attempts to make “M, O, A, I” refer to his name.  Only he could pull off the extraordinarily long pause Malvolio takes before noticing the postscript to Maria’s false letter.  And yet, in the Sir Topas scene, the very deliberateness he lends Malvolio also serves as a sign of the justness of his anger.

In other roles Gordon S. Miller is a jolly Fabian, Stephen Russell makes more of the ill-used Antonio than I have seen before and Michael Blake is a well-spoken and sympathetic Sebastian.  Henry has an fascinating idea that she does not make as much of as she could.  She has Mac Fyfe as Valentine in Orsino’s household act exactly as imperious as does Malvolio in Olivia’s, thus suggesting that like Viola, Malvolio also has a double in the play.  Similarly, she has a woman appear mostly in shadows who is dressed exactly as is Feste and thus suggesting the same thing.  The problem is that Henry never makes clear what the purpose of these extra doppelgänger may be in the context of the Viola-Sebastian relationship.  

As the finest Twelfth Night of the past four productions of the play at Stratford, the play has to be placed on any theatre-goer’s must-see list.  The rapport among the actors and beautifully natural way in which they speak Shakespeare’s verse should be a model for all other productions of Shakespeare at the Festival.  Those who wish to see Shakespeare done right in Stratford’s most iconic theatre need look no further.

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photos: (from top) Shannon Taylor as Olivia, Michael Blake as Sebastian, Sarah Afful as Viola and E.B. Smith as Orsino; Brent Carver as Feste, Tom Rooney as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Geraint Wyn Davies as Sir Toby Belch with two singing bowls; Rod Beattie as Malvolio  ©2017 Cylla von Tiedemann.

For tickets, visit www.stratfordfestival.ca.