Can you stage William
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for 10+ year olds and make it entertaining? The initial
reply may be “good luck” but that holds only until you have seen what Southwark
Playhouse does with the play. Southwark Playhouse is a tiny theatre in the Borough
of Southwark in east London and they are planning to show Twelfth Night to some
1400 school children for free. They inform us in their programme that most of
those young people will be going to the theatre for the first time. Applause,
please.
They are doing Twelfth
Night in a shortened version, an hour and a half, if you will, with
half a dozen actors playing about a dozen roles. Unorthodox, exuberant,
bizarre, call it what you want but this is a production for young newcomers and
not for gray-haired veterans with pre-conceptions or worse.
Let’s get started. Some of actors are playing
music and making a hubbub in the playing area which is the size of a big
bedroom. There are five women and one man, and they introduce themselves and
explain how we can recognize them in their roles. Becky Barry tells us that she
will play Viola when she is wearing a hat and her brother Sebastian when she is
hatless.
Sapphire Joy plays Olivia (no
cap) and Orsinia, hat on. That is not a typo. Orsino is Orsinia. Carolina
Parker is Antonia the Sea Captain and Sir Toby Belch. Liv Spencer is Valentina
and Maria. Luke Wilson, the sole male in the cast, is Sir Andrew Aguecheek and
Malvolio. Aruhan Galieva is Feste and she is an instrumentalist and singer as
well. As you can see there is some gender confusion but let’s leave that for
now.
Many scenes and lines have to be
cut if the show is to be finished in an hour and a half with some singing and
stage business to entertain us. We start with “if music be the food love” with
Feste playing on the keyboard and move quickly to Olivia’s place where she is
refusing to have anything to do with men. The young people and even the older attendees
one hopes, can keep up with the fact that Olivia and Orsinia are played by the
same actor and not raise an eyebrow when they find out that Orsinia is madly in
love with Olivia.
Viola impersonating a man arrives
at Orsinia’s palace and we can feel amorous electricity between them. And that
is nothing compared to the erotic current flowing from Olivia to Viola a.k.a.
Cesario.
Twin brother Sebastian arrives just
in time to avert Olivia’s passion away from his sister to himself and learn the
meaning of the word bliss. Some people who took Twelfth Night in high
school and can still remember a few things may point out that Orsinia and
Olivia, and Viola and Sebastian appear on stage at the same time. How do we
handle that? Director Anna Girvan and Southwark Playhouse think out of the box.
Grab a member from the audience and put a hat on her – presto, you have an
Olivia and an Orsinia. What about Viola and brother Sebastian? How quickly can
Galieva get in the same costume as Barry?
The production is fast-moving. There
is dancing, singing, athletics (Malvolio is very good at pushups) and general
mayhem on the stage. You remember the confrontation between Viola and Sir
Andrew where the two are bamboozled into an almost-sword-fight? There is no
need for swords in this production. One of them gets a guitar and the other one
a saxophone and the almost-duel is fought like that.
The actors are highly competent,
and Girvan maintains discipline in the delivery of Shakespeare’s lines while organizing shenanigans for the rest of the
production.
As for the gender confusion,
Olivia and Sebastian, Orsinia and Viola found love and bliss and lived happily
ever after. Vigorous applause.
_____
Twelfth Night by William
Shakespeare opened on January 19 and will play until February 9, 2019 at the Southwark
Playhouse, 77-85 Newington Causeway, London SE1 6BD. http://southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/
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