“a fine intuition into the play’s heart.” 30 If critics were divided about costumes and several individual performances, they were unanimous in their praise for Lindsay Crouse’s Viola.
In 1987 Kenneth Branagh directed the Renaissance Theatre Company’s production at the Riverside Studios. It was set in a wintry landscape with a Christmas tree and a snowy cemetery. RichardBriers’ “first-rate” Malvolio was “nicely balanced by Anton Lesser’s shaggy-locked Feste, Frances Barber’s clear-spoken Viola, and Caroline Langrishe’s Olivia.” 31 The production was later re-created for television. In the same year Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl played at the Donmar Warehouse after a lengthy provincial tour. It was a controversial and irreverent production, with the drunken revelers blasting out the Sinatra classic “My Way.” Michael Ratcliffe in the
Observer
thought it “a
Twelfth Night
for those who had never seen the play before and those who thought they never wanted to see it again,” whereas Peter Kemp in the
Independent
argued that “Self-indulgence—mocked in
Twelfth Night
—is pandered to in this production.” 32
Tim Supple’s 1998 production at the Young Vic contrived to be both “visually simple, its costumes vaguely suggesting an Eastern exoticism, and aurally rich, the alien beauty of its Eastern melodies and instruments creating an Illyria of otherness and wonder.” 33 For his final season in 2002–03 at the Donmar Warehouse, Sam Mendes staged the play in repertory with Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
. With Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio, Emily Watson as Viola, and David Bradley as Aguecheek, it was “a production that found multiple dimensions of
Twelfth Night
with highly suggestive staging and music and a minimum of detail.” 34
Twelfth Night
has been set everywhere and nowhere: in 2000 Shakespeare and Company set it “against fragments of a deteriorating seaside carnival”; in the same year the Theatre at Monmouth’s production was set in “a 1920s seaside resort,” while the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s production of that year created a “1930s cabaret mood.” On the other hand, companies such as the “touring five-person troupe Actors From the London Stage, thrive on early modern practices such as open spaces and doubling, tripling, and quadrupling roles. In the 1994 performance … at the Clemson Shakespeare Festival, Geoffrey Church played Orsino, Feste, and Fabian.” 35 Similarly, Shenandoah Shakespeare’s productions in 1995 and 2000–01 successfully experimented with cross-gender cross-casting, with David McCallum playing both Maria and Sebastian. The 2002 all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London played with the sexual ambiguity of the casting, causingthe audience to gasp as Orsino kissed Cesario. Mark Rylance found a great deal of unsuspected comedy in the part of Olivia, and Paul Chahidi was a wonderfully busy Maria. The production was especially successful when played in the hall of the Middle Temple, where Manningham had seen the original version exactly four hundred years before.
The play has continued in recent years to thrive onstage despite Michael Billington’s contention that while “
Twelfth Night
may be Shakespeare’s most perfect comedy, it is also one of the hardest to bring off in the theater because of its sheer kaleidoscopic range of moods.” 36 The illusionist productions of the nineteenth century are a thing of the past, their place taken by film with all its potential for realism. There were a number of silent screen versions, including Charles Kent’s for Vitagraph in 1910, which, despite lasting for only twelve minutes, employs relatively sophisticated cinematographic techniques. 37 In 1955 Yakov Fried produced a Russian-language version in black and white which critics have seen as a response to the death of Stalin in its “fresh air of political renewal” which “opens up Shakespeare’s play
In 1987 Kenneth Branagh directed the Renaissance Theatre Company’s production at the Riverside Studios. It was set in a wintry landscape with a Christmas tree and a snowy cemetery. RichardBriers’ “first-rate” Malvolio was “nicely balanced by Anton Lesser’s shaggy-locked Feste, Frances Barber’s clear-spoken Viola, and Caroline Langrishe’s Olivia.” 31 The production was later re-created for television. In the same year Declan Donnellan’s production for Cheek by Jowl played at the Donmar Warehouse after a lengthy provincial tour. It was a controversial and irreverent production, with the drunken revelers blasting out the Sinatra classic “My Way.” Michael Ratcliffe in the
Observer
thought it “a
Twelfth Night
for those who had never seen the play before and those who thought they never wanted to see it again,” whereas Peter Kemp in the
Independent
argued that “Self-indulgence—mocked in
Twelfth Night
—is pandered to in this production.” 32
Tim Supple’s 1998 production at the Young Vic contrived to be both “visually simple, its costumes vaguely suggesting an Eastern exoticism, and aurally rich, the alien beauty of its Eastern melodies and instruments creating an Illyria of otherness and wonder.” 33 For his final season in 2002–03 at the Donmar Warehouse, Sam Mendes staged the play in repertory with Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
. With Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio, Emily Watson as Viola, and David Bradley as Aguecheek, it was “a production that found multiple dimensions of
Twelfth Night
with highly suggestive staging and music and a minimum of detail.” 34
Twelfth Night
has been set everywhere and nowhere: in 2000 Shakespeare and Company set it “against fragments of a deteriorating seaside carnival”; in the same year the Theatre at Monmouth’s production was set in “a 1920s seaside resort,” while the Alabama Shakespeare Festival’s production of that year created a “1930s cabaret mood.” On the other hand, companies such as the “touring five-person troupe Actors From the London Stage, thrive on early modern practices such as open spaces and doubling, tripling, and quadrupling roles. In the 1994 performance … at the Clemson Shakespeare Festival, Geoffrey Church played Orsino, Feste, and Fabian.” 35 Similarly, Shenandoah Shakespeare’s productions in 1995 and 2000–01 successfully experimented with cross-gender cross-casting, with David McCallum playing both Maria and Sebastian. The 2002 all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe theater in London played with the sexual ambiguity of the casting, causingthe audience to gasp as Orsino kissed Cesario. Mark Rylance found a great deal of unsuspected comedy in the part of Olivia, and Paul Chahidi was a wonderfully busy Maria. The production was especially successful when played in the hall of the Middle Temple, where Manningham had seen the original version exactly four hundred years before.
The play has continued in recent years to thrive onstage despite Michael Billington’s contention that while “
Twelfth Night
may be Shakespeare’s most perfect comedy, it is also one of the hardest to bring off in the theater because of its sheer kaleidoscopic range of moods.” 36 The illusionist productions of the nineteenth century are a thing of the past, their place taken by film with all its potential for realism. There were a number of silent screen versions, including Charles Kent’s for Vitagraph in 1910, which, despite lasting for only twelve minutes, employs relatively sophisticated cinematographic techniques. 37 In 1955 Yakov Fried produced a Russian-language version in black and white which critics have seen as a response to the death of Stalin in its “fresh air of political renewal” which “opens up Shakespeare’s play