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by William Shakespeare, adapted & directed by Gregory Prest

Canadian Stage, High Park Amphitheatre, Toronto

July 19–September 6, 2026

Feste: “Then you are mad indeed, if you be no better in your wits than a Fool” (Act 4, Scene 2)

Could Sir Andrew be Twelfth Night’s real protagonist? It certainly seems so in Gregory Prest’s current High Park production. Flamboyant and rubber-limbed, Justin Otto circles the stage with cartoon energy, finding delicious lazzi and outsize comedy coiled inside Shakespeare’s text. Even in byplay, he keeps tugging the eye towards him.

Beyond Otto’s indisputable talent, he dominates partly because the rest of the show is executed so thoroughly “by the book” that its polished, glossy performances sometimes risk diluting the wit beneath the words. Prest treats madness as Illyria’s governing weather, and the production is most convincing when that madness takes physical possession of its actors. Prest’s 90-minute adaptation preserves the plot’s dramatic skeleton while stripping away some of its meditative tissue, tilting the play towards action and broad comedy.

After the tempest separates twins Viola (Caroline Toal) and Sebastian (Ori Black), each believes the other dead. Viola disguises herself as the page Cesario and enters the service of Duke Orsino (Farhang Ghajar), setting off a chain of desires in which almost everyone falls for the wrong person. Viola loves Orsino, who pines for Countess Olivia (Ghazal Azarbad), who promptly falls for Cesario, whom she marries unaware that ‘he” is Sebastian.

The interpretation of Illyria’s disorder as the production’s compass is announced before the action begins. Dressed in the striped tights and red fool’s cap of a medieval jester, Feste (Steven Sutcliffe) welcomes the audience with an original monologue describing love as untameable, “murderous and unjust,” and as destabilizing as a shipwreck. The ensemble then plunges into a rain-lashed tempest set to the familiar sea shanty “Wellerman,” establishing a world in which desire, like the storm, will scramble identities and knock lives off course.

Sim Suzer’s handsome two-level set turns Illyria into a machine for entrances, escapes and partial perspectives. Twin staircases descend from an upper stage framed by arches, while doorways scattered across the structure allow the action to keep spilling in several directions at once. Figures appear and disappear behind curtains, observe one another without being seen, and give architectural form to the play’s mistaken identities. Patches of grass interrupt the orderly architecture, as though appetite and nature were sprouting through its attempts at control. For the costumes, Suzer draws on a wintry palette of antique pink, deep green, brown and plum — a subtle nod to the play’s title.

In the spirit of theatre in High Park, the acting is light-hearted and accessible, sometimes so broadly expressive that it recalls the emotional legibility of a 2010s sitcom. Rather than treating Shakespeare’s verse as ceremonial language, the actors often let it spill directly from feeling. Toal provides a marvellous example in Viola’s speech “Make me a willow cabin at your gate”.. Attempting to woo Olivia on Orsino’s behalf, she releases the words in a single accelerating rush, the language gathering volume, urgency and emotional heat as Viola’s own concealed desire threatens to overtake her assignment.

Azarbad gives Olivia a chin-high self-possession that makes each crack in her composure particularly pleasurable. Ghajar’s mercurial Orsino, meanwhile, is vain and extravagantly self-involved, so entangled in the romantic delusion he has constructed around himself that he becomes the chief obstacle to his own happiness.

Yet despite the actors’ crisp work, the central romantic triangle feels cumbersome and oddly inert, though some of that weight lies in the text itself. Exquisite in passages, this Shakespearean comedy remains complex and elusive, shaped by a fantastical resolution and cryptic emotional currents. Among them is the ambiguous, much-debated homoerotic dimension of the bond between the sailor Antonio and Sebastian — an interpretation this production chooses not to pursue.

The production catches fire most often in its comic eruptions. Inside Olivia’s household, gags and slapstick abound as her maid Maria (Navtej Sandhu) recruits the drunken Sir Toby (Mike Shara) and the magnificently asinine Sir Andrew into a scheme to convince the steward Malvolio (Rick Roberts) that Olivia secretly desires him.

Prest fills these scenes with images of buoyant idiocy. In one, Toby pursues Andrew across the stage, pelting him with carrots as Andrew retreats beneath an enormous metal basin. The pair run, duck and howl with such complete disregard for order that Feste, the play’s professional fool, appears by comparison to be its sanest inhabitant.

Faced with Olivia’s rowdy pack of conspirators, Malvolio gradually proves worthy of the audience’s pity. Roberts gives him brisk, haughty authority that no one else respects. Particularly successful is the scene in which Malvolio discovers a forged letter apparently written by Olivia and reads it with gathering erotic fervour. Above him, Maria, Toby and Andrew crouch along the balcony, ducking out of sight with Chaplinesque precision while repeatedly struggling to contain their delight. Later, blindfolded and yoked by a wooden board, Malvolio is baited for laughs by Feste and the conspirators, who never quite recognize when their prank curdles into cruelty.

“Are all the people mad?” Sebastian cries out shortly after washing ashore in Illyria. Prest’s answer is an emphatic yes.

Alessandro Stracuzzi

Photo: Caroline Toal as Viola and Farhang Ghajar as Orsino; Farhang Ghajar as Orsino (centre) with ensemble; Justin Otto as Andrew Aguecheek, Navtej Sandhu as Maria and Mike Shara as Sir Toby; Rick Roberts as Malvolio, Ghazal Azarbad as Olivia and Navtej Sandhu as Maria. © 2026 Dahlia Katz..

For tickets visit: www.canadianstage.com.