Writer: William Shakespeare
Director: Niamh Handley-Vaughan
While its title may suggest a midwinter setting, Twelfth Night works surprisingly well as an open-air performance in the midst of a heatwave. Its dual tales – a love triangle involving a gender-switched character, and a group of drunken friends setting up an officious butler with a practical joke that arguably goes much too far – promise plenty of light tomfoolery to enjoy on an unseasonably warm summer evening.
Nonsense Theatre’s production – subtitled “A nonsensical medieval romp” – is at its best when leaning into the absurdity of its low-budget offering. Jed McLoughlin’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek is a bumbling knight whose horse is represented, Monty Python-style, by a pair of coconut half-shells. McLoughlin also plays Sebastian, the identical twin brother of Viola, with a resemblance that ramps up the misunderstandings in the play’s latter stages. And yet Cara Neal could not be more dissimilar to McLoughlin, being half his size, a redhead, and devoid of Sebastian’s great big bushy beard.
Neal’s role as the shipwrecked Viola, now cross-dressing as Cesario and working as manservant to Daniel Brindley’s Duke Orsino, firmly roots that plot strand in Shakespeare’s well-worn romantic comedy spirit. Neal works well with Jericho Taylor’s Olivia to portray one side of the triangle, as the reclusive countess falls for the “boy” employed by the man who would pursue her, unaware that Cesario is actually a woman who yearns for her master. The fly in the ointment is the portrayal of Orsino as a mewling man-child, calling into question why Viola would be interested in him in the first place.
Much more interesting is the second plot involving Olivia’s drunken relative, the gender-swapped Tobi Belch. Kitty Mason has a blast as the lecherous clown, although with director Niamh Handley-Vaughan’s Maria and Rebekah Nicol as a slightly underpowered Feste, the antics soon risk becoming tiresome.
What saves this plot is an understated performance by Chloe Orrock as the officious Malvolia. With everyone else going large with their characters, Olivia’s chief steward stands out, moving deliberately and slowly while everyone else sprints through the gardens of the Actors’ Church. It is a shame that after the trio’s peak succeeds and Malvolia mistakenly believes her employer has romantic interests in her, Orrock’s character joins them in an over-the-top performance.
The inclusion of several acoustic performances of modern pop songs from the likes of Taylor Swift and Chappell Roan is fun, although they add length to a production that would benefit from a snappier race through some of Shakespeare’s more turgid passages. With two of the principal characters recast as women where one would normally expect men, it also minimises the central conceit of Viola’s gender-flipping disguise in ways the play’s early moments never quite recover from.
Still, that is made up for by the later jokes in which McLoughlin and Neal are constantly mistaken for one another. In those moments, Nonsense Theatre really embraces the idea of twisting Shakespeare’s play into something far sillier than exists on the page. Only then does one see brief glimmers of the nonsensical medieval romp we have been promised.
Reviewed on 9 July 2026 and continues to tour
