Shakespeare slips on a banana skin

Author: COLIN ROSE
Date: 12/11/2000
Publication: Sun Herald (AU)
Section: Metro
Page: 7

Richard Roxburgh presents a rather too broad interpretation of one of Shakespeare's classic comedies.

TWELFTH NIGHT

Belvoir Street, Upstairs Theatre.

Rating: 5/10.

THIS just in from the UK: Shakespeare was a dope fiend. Two forensic scientists are analysing the contents of several 400-year-old tobacco pipes found in Shakespeare's home in Stratford-upon-Avon.

He was, it seems, suspiciously imaginative. What you and I mistook for authorial genius may yet be explained away by a fondness for the whacky baccy.

Perhaps Shakespeare's pot smoking, if and when it is proved, will see the boss of literature's dead white males reborn as a psychedelic hero of the counter culture. Will teenagers suddenly take an interest? Will a full appreciation of Shakespeare's art depend on getting high?

And so, floating on a cloud of marijuana smoke, to Twelfth Night.

Shakespeare's second best comedy (I put As You Like It at the top of the list) is such a frenzy of love and madness that it too must count as proof of Shakespeare's chemically induced derangement. I wonder if Elizabethan drug dealers pushed ecstasy as well as dope?

Viola (Maya Stange) loves Orsino (Marton Csokas). Olivia (Lucy Bell) loves Orsino's pageboy, Cesario, who is Viola in disguise. Antonio (Darren Weller) and Sebastian (Matthew Moore), Viola's twin brother, share the love that dare not speak its name (which doesn't stop Sebastian from falling in love with Olivia).

Orsino says he loves Olivia, although he is more likely in love with love (but what of his growing affection for Cesario?). And Malvolio (Frank Whitten), a tragedy for him and cruel comedy for the audience, is in love with himself.

Still with me?

Richard Roxburgh has directed once before, an adaptation of Tim Winton's novel That Eye, The Sky for the Sydney Festival in 1994. It was a superlative production. His Twelfth Night is not nearly as impressive.

This is a deliberately unpolished interpretation, funny but with little nuance. Roxburgh and company indulge an infatuation with low comedy pratfalls, double takes, silly walks and not much else gets a look in.

So Shakespeare is cut with the absurd and over-the-top characterisation of Monty Python will comedy ever escape that lengthy shadow? and plenty of vintage slapstick, most obviously in the performances of Steve Rodgers and Daniel Wyllie as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew.

Rodgers and Wyllie are a pair of volatile and immoderate actors, best deployed in a controlled environment. Here their director lets them off the leash and together they run away with the play to la-la land.

There is goofiness all right, but the play's poignant and bittersweet qualities have been neglected. Yes, Sir Toby is a clown, but also, what is missing from Rodgers's performance, a spiteful sadist. Wyllie's Sir Andrew is a stock upper-class twit; nothing more interesting.

Stange is uncomfortable with the verse. Like Helena in the Rupert Everett/Michelle Pfeiffer film version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Stange's Viola has been given a comic prop. Helena had a bicycle, Viola gets a scooter; but she hasn't found much to do with it.

Bell's girlish, tizzy and petulant Olivia is something of a reprise of the character she recently played in The Falls for the Griffin Theatre. It worked there but it is less convincing for Olivia, who is altogether more grown-up.

The fundamental and paradoxical rule of comedy is that the more seriously you take your character, the funnier everyone else will find you. And it is for this reason that the three great performances are Csokas's Orsino, Richard Sydenham's Feste and Whitten's Malvolio.

Csokas has fashioned an affectionate parody of the Latin lover: his Orsino is suave and self-aware, performing even when the audience is just himself.

I would have said that Sydenham was too young for Feste, but he brings a quiet concentration and solemnity to the fellow ``wise enough to play the fool".

When Feste steps behind the microphone for his first song, ``O Mistress Mine", I was weirdly reminded of David Bowie singing the downbeat ballad Wild Is The Wind. Later the whole company has a go at an antiqued version of Nick Cave. ``Come sail thy ships round me," they sing.

Whitten is perfect for Malvolio. Consider, for a start, that wonderful hangdog expression. Too bad about the more obvious comedy: on ``some have greatness thrust upon them" he wiggles a giant canary yellow codpiece at Olivia.

The finale is one of Shakespeare's most brilliantly inflected passages, but here the lows don't bottom out and the highs don't peak. The scene's surprises and reversals don't really pay off because the audience hasn't been primed for anything more than banana-skin comedy.