Twelfth Night – Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Sean Holmes

Twelfth Night is the most melancholic of Shakespeare’s comedies. There is mourning for the death of two young men: Viola believing her brother Sebastian drowned at sea, Olivia in turn mourning for her brother, vowing to mourn for seven. So too is there unrequited love: Orsino’s for Olivia and later Viola’s seeming hopeless passion for Orsino. Some productions suggest the sea captain Antonio harbours love for Sebastian, whom he has rescued. The songs too are melancholy, the play ending with Feste’s ‘For the rain it raineth every day’.

Director Sean Holmes sets Illyria in a dilapidated bar in a faded fifties American town. On stage is a merry-go-round horse and a juke box. Down in the pit are a couple of wrecked cars, which will see service in the Letter scene; a dead deer hangs suspended from the ceiling, all ready for the hart/heart pun. What will this setting bring to the play? Artistic director of the Globe, Michelle Terry, in a recent interview, talks of “our ‘broken society’”, the play being “recognisably now”.

But it’s hard to see any real resonance in this setting, or indeed any real coherence in the production as whole. Where most of the cast belong to this world of Americana, the shipwrecked siblings Viola and Sebastian appear in full Elizabethan rig. And nobody seems to notice. There is a hint of power imbalances: Shoa Babayemi’s imposing Olivia towers over a distinctly low-key Orsino (Bryan Dick), and Nadine Higgins gives it large as Sir Toby Belch. But beyond this, it is not clear what Holmes is suggesting.

There are some good individual performances – Victoria Elliott in baseball kit as Feste is both funny and versatile and George Fouracres is genuinely comedic as Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Jacoba Williams, too, is entertaining as Fabian. But why the Brummie accent? Sophie Russell’s Malvolio has a certain dignity, although this production strips out references to his puritanism and the infamous cross-gartered stockings have become a complete yellow body suit. The scene of his “gulling” is disappointing: placing Malvolio in an underground prison with only his hands visible means his words are scarcely audible.

In fact audibility is something of an issue throughout this production. Michelle Terry is notable as Viola for her clear diction. But the characterisation of Sebastian (Ciaran O’Brien) as a pompous self-regarding Englishman is disturbing: he seems to have nothing in common with his twin. The production is not attentive to much of the real comedy of the piece. Set piece comic scenes are severely pruned – the would-be duel between Cesario and Sir Andrew hardly begins before it is halted, the responses of the characters in hiding who witness Malvolio’s reading of Olivia’s letter are muted, as it is they who play the scene from those two wrecked cars. The audience’s burst of hearty laughter at Olivia’s “Most wonderful!” when she sees two identical husbands is a rare moment when the director trusts the comedy of the text. There is, however, coherence in the music (original pieces by James Fortune) and the excellent band of musicians.

There have been some notable productions of Twelfth Night in the last decade. This, alas, is not one of them.

Runs until 30 October 2021