With Samuel West’s superb Malvolio, Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Twelfth Night for the RSC is a melancholic joy at Royal Shakespeare Theatre
“Maybe this Christmas won’t be quite as bad as last year”
When you’ve seen a fair bit of Shakespeare, it can be hard to get too enthused about the prospect of seeing more of it. So I’ve only visited the RSC and the Globe sparingly to say the least in the last few years due to their respective travel time and comfort issues. An unexpectedly gorgeous Twelfth Night at the Orange Tree reminded me of just how good a fresh perspective on Shakespeare can be and with some good word-of-mouth to hand, I booked into the RSC’s new production of the same play.
Prasanna Puwanarajah’s Twelfth Night also emerges as a brilliantly inspired take on something so familiar to so many. Opting for an appropriately seasonal setting of Twixtmas time, the scene is thus set for its unpredictable emotional swings, festive frivolity still pootling on in one corner, hints of melancholy angst percolating elsewhere, unexpected urges to get it on popping up from nowhere. Everything being the result of hazy excess feels just about right from its Christmas cheer to its casual cruelty.
It is fascinating how Puwanarajah has nominally made some of the same decisions – amping up the melancholy, foregrounding Feste – but to vastly different results. James Cotterill’s towering set design of organ pipes is wonderfully suggestive, alongside being a great alternative to a box tree; his costumes more colourful but also hinting at a greater emotional depth than their brightness might initially concede. Composer Matt Maltese offers up a lovely score that similarly adds to the poignancy of the time.
In a supremely well cast ensemble, Samuel West offers up a ferociously intelligent take on Malvolio, punishingly severe but when that punishment is meted upon him, the emotional reversal is almost too much to bear. Freema Agyeman caps off a superlative Shakespearean year with a wonderfully self-possessed Olivia, Bally Gill’s Orsino is all kinds of randy fun, Joplin Sibtain’s Sir Toby and Demetri Goritsas’ Sir Andrew hit just the right comic notes, Michael Grady-Hall’s Feste is almost pantomime-like in his entertainment. Against all this, Gwyneth Keyworth’s Viola has a job to register strongly but it is an embarrassment of riches that she’s working alongside. Maybe I should be braving the vicissitudes of Chiltern Railways more often….
