This production is so much better than it was when I saw it on its second night way back in June — and that’s a triumph for the actors.
I returned to this show primarily because I wanted to see Camille Legg’s Viola. Just before Twelfth Night opened at Bard on the Beach on June 20, Legg was felled by a nasty infection. Kate Besworth, the understudy for Viola, stepped in — without ever having done a run-through — and triumphed. Besworth’s performance was confident, impressive, and nuanced, the definition of professionalism.
And it’s a delight to see Legg, the actor who fully rehearsed the role and has now performed it for seven weeks, as Viola. There’s a winning combination of depth and ebullience in Legg’s characterization: Viola’s grief for her twin brother Sebastian, whom she presumes drowned, her giddy sense of discovery when playing with the masculine tropes of her male alter-ego Cesario, and her bracing self-assurance when matching wits with Olivia. No wonder the countess falls for her.
Let me give you some context. Shipwrecked, Viola washes up in Illyria believing that Sebastian, who was on the same voyage, is likely dead. For safety and to give herself time to adjust to her new life, Viola disguises herself as a male youth, takes the name Cesario, and finds employment with Count Orsino. Orsino sends Cesario to woo the Countess Olivia on his behalf, but Olivia, who has been in mourning for her brother, falls in love with Viola-as-Cesario, who has fallen in love with Orsino.
In the subplot, Olivia’s rowdy kinsman Sir Toby Belch is drinking and carousing with the geeky Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Olivia’s maid Maria. When the puritanical Malvolio, the manager of Olivia’s court, clamps down on the revelers, threatening Sir Toby and Sir Andrew with expulsion from Olivia’s court, the three friends hatch a plot in which they convince Malvolio that Olivia is in love with him and trick him into making a fool of himself by wearing yellow, cross-gartered stockings and smiling non-stop to impress the countess.
Twelfth Night has a lot to say about the intoxication of love and the slipperiness of gender and sexual orientation. It’s also a compelling blend of comedy and melancholy. Maria, Sir Toby, and Sir Andrew’s gulling of Malvolio starts off as hijinks, but takes a dark turn into cruelty: they drive him to the brink of madness.
When I first saw this Twelfth Night back in June, director Diana Donnelly’s vision for the production annoyed me no end. It still doesn’t work, but this time I knew what to expect going in, so I found the unfolding of Donnelly’s conceit less distracting.
Donnelly has set this Twelfth Night in a carnival/circus — and that backslash is important because it’s never clear exactly where we are. This production includes a carnivalesque swan boat, but there are also references to circus rings — but none of this goes anywhere. The Countess Olivia is supposedly a trapeze artist, for instance, but that’s just a passing reference; Olivia’s supposed profession has no impact whatsoever on either her character or the action. Because Donnelly’s framing is so arbitrary, it mostly feels meaningless, and its emphasis on frivolity at the expense of virtually everything else obliterates much of the play’s potential.
But, seven weeks in, the performance level in this production is more consistent and the whole show feels more coherent.
Take the comic trio, for instance. The first time I saw Bard’s Twelfth Night this year, Nathan Kay was fantastic as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. He still is. Kay is such an inventive actor: he brings a valley-boy innocence and stupidity to Sir Andrew that makes the character freshly surprising.
The first time I saw this show, there was a big gap between Kay’s Sir Andrew and the characterizations of the other members of the subplot’s conniving team: Marcus Youssef’s Sir Toby and Evelyn Chew’s Maria were both flat. But now, to their great credit, both Youssef and Chew have loosened up substantially: where they were once tentative and contained, they are now having a freewheeling good time, which makes a huge difference comically and goes a long way towards resetting the subplot’s comic balance.
Youssef and Chew have also developed a clearer and more satisfying arc in the romantic relationship between Sir Toby and Maria. Director Donnelly isn’t around anymore, so we have the actors alone to thank for this improvement.
It’s not just these two, either. Overall, this production has ramped up its consistency. The comic duel between Sir Andrew and Viola/Cesario is still dumb — in Donnelly’s conception, it’s fought with toys rather than swords — but there’s more shape to the confrontation. Because it’s set up with greater seriousness, it’s still funny but it doesn’t feel as arbitrary.
And, of course, there were already superb performances in this production. I’m in love with Olivia Hutt’s Oliva — partly because I’m crazy about her voice. Veda Hille has written a bunch of original songs and, in scoring the show, Hille has taken full advantage of the richness and range of Hutt’s singing. But that richness is still there when the actor is speaking. And I’m so impressed by the stillness and honesty with which Hutt delivers the text.
Anton Lipovetsky is playing Olivia’s fool, Feste; his understated wit is rewarding. And Charlie Gallant’s work as Sebastian may have ripened even more fully. I marvel at the depth of feeling that he arrives with and his ability to balance that emotion with committed comic business — when Sebastian gets into a bit of kung-fu fighting with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew, for instance.
The actors are still restricted by some of Donnelly’s choices, of course.
Ivy Charles is a strong actor, for instance, but Donnelly has turned Charles’s character, Antonio, the pirate who is, arguably, in love with Sebastian, into Antonia, and that decision is unrewarding. Antonio’s reckless love has traction if he’s a man, but it loses internal tension when the character’s a woman. And, because the female-pirate idea is unexplored, it feels useless.
But the biggest loss is still Donnelly’s reconception of Malvolio, whom she turns into a woman named Malvolia. Dawn Petten is a resourceful actor and she scores some well-earned laughs as the character, but what she can’t fully access — because the directorial constraints won’t let her — is the full force of the character’s, and the play’s wrenching sadness.
As I’ve mentioned, the comic gang’s revenge on Malvolio goes too far: they nearly drive him insane, which speaks to the dark potential of opening one’s self to romance: you may be deceived. Viola’s deception of Olivia and Orsino works out for everybody. But the deception of Malvolio is malicious and his pain provides a counterbalance to the other lovers’ good fortune.
Donnelly’s misconception of Malvolio even plays out in the costuming. Mara Gottler’s designs, including Sir Andrew’s eye-searing oranges and plaids, are spectacular, but Malvolia’s spangly cross-gartered outfit, the most spectacular costume of all, underlines one of the downsides of the director’s interpretation. In celebrating the superficiality of spectacle, it obscures the devastating reality of betrayal.
To be clear. none of this is Petten’s fault. She’s playing the role for all she’s worth, but the production is working against her.
For a while this time through, I considered the possibility that the first time around I might have been unfairly resistant to Donnelly’s interpretation. Clearly, she has decided to embrace theatrical artifice and go with a style of storytelling that doesn’t care about underlying coherence, that’s willing to grab pretty much any effect that’s fun in the moment. That swan boat is untethered from the Tunnel of Love that’s its presumptive home, for instance; Olivia and Sebastian just come gliding onstage in it as if swan boats were an everyday form of transportation. I’m still open to the idea that I should be giving Donnelly more slack. But, for me, it’s inarguable that the superficiality of her approach does a disservice to the play’s potential.
When a director leaves a production after it opens, a few different things can happen. The show can mellow within the terms set by the director. Without the director’s guiding hand, things can go off the rails. Or, as happens here, the show can grow, based in part on qualities developed with the director, but also thanks to the creativity of actors who, left to their own devices, refine and enrich the production.
I am so impressed by the creative resilience of this acting ensemble.
TWELFTH NIGHT by William Shakespeare. Directed Diana Donnelly. On Thursday, June 20. A Bard on the Beach production running on the BMO Mainstage Tent until September 21. Tickets and information
PHOTO CREDIT: Camille Legg as Viola and Aidan Correia as Orsino: a little gender-blurring romance. (Photo by Tim Matheson)
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