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Review: Twelfth Night

Third week is shaping up to be Shakespeare week, or more specifically, Shakespeare comedy week. An experimental take on Much Ado incorporating shopping trolleys and hat stands has already attracted rave reviews from this paper, and we have high hopes for All’s Well that Ends Well, the first of Trinity term’s garden plays, to be acted out on a Magdalen lawn in the summery evening air. So what of Mary Franklin’s production of Twelfth Night which, by the sounds of its director’s spiel, will occupy ground somewhere between the graceful traditionalism of Rafaella Marcus’s All’s Well and the chaos of Much Ado?

In Twelfth Night, we are told, there are two lives that not only are devoted to love but suitably ‘stultified’ by it. Here we have, Illyria: ‘a land paralyzed, set in slow motion, transfixed by dust’. Going by very select scenes I was shown at the preview, this intriguing premise is not followed up. I saw no evidence of dust nor of paralysis – unless you count the paralysed look on the actors’ faces when yet another line was forgotten or entry was mistimed. Facebook excites me with the promise of a radical production combining sexual languor and underlying homoeroticism, excessive drunkenness and madness. But as for the ‘radical production’ bit: if Franklin thinks that putting Orsino, Sir Toby et. al in expensive suits and chopping the script up bit is radical then she is sadly mistaken.

Tom Woodward is suitably melodramatic in the role of Orsino – at times enjoyable, he is the show’s most decent performer. Agnes Meath-Baker, on the other hand, whom this reviewer enjoyed so much in Black Comedy, is disappointing as our transvestite heroine. She clearly possesses talent, though not for impersonating men. She also seems visibly affected by the presence of Woodward, constantly trying to overdo his well-honed preening peacock act with ever more gratuitous displays of emotion.

Among the other characters whom I saw, Jacob Follini-Press is competent and entertaining, yet captured nothing of Sir Andrew’s oblivious stupidity, preferring rather to endow his character with a certain hedonistic foppishness more appropriate, in fact, for the character of Sir Toby.

Do not get me wrong. There is nothing that is awfully bad about this production; but there isn’t much good either, and my main concern upon leaving the preview was the lack of organisation. For unexplained reasons I was not treated to Malvolio or Maria or Olivia, and only caught a glimpse of the actress playing Feste. A preview that consisted of scenes chopped up inexplicably, stumbled lines and one character reading directly from his script certainly did not allay my fears that this is a disorganised troupe of undoubtedly able actors who will have to put in a lot of hard work in order to make this play worth paying seven pounds for.

two stars out of five 

Twelfth Night is on at the OFS studio, Tuesday-Saturday of 3rd Week, 19.30

 

 

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