"A wonderful mesh of magic flecked with truth" - Anastasia Miari reviews The RSC production of Twelfth Night.
The World Shakespeare Festival has this year aimed to create new responses to Shakespeare,placing his plays in a context that an audience of 2012 can relate to. The Royal Shakespeare Company has stayed true to this brief with a beautifully composed production of Twelfth Night at The Roundhouse directed by David Farr. Melding Shakespeare’s poetic verse with various anachronistic elements from across periods in history, Farr makes the world of Illyria as foreign to an audience as it is to its shipwrecked protagonists.
Upon entering the space, the audience is immediately enthralled by this visual feast. Scanning the space, we’re met by an enormous stage with a ship-like feel created by exposed wooden floorboards and a gang plank that juts across the audience. Adding to this theme are various nautical articles including an enormous globe, a chandelier covered in netting and a liquor cluttered desk. A wash of blue light engulfs the stage, conjuring images of sunken ships. Most impressive is a meter high pool of aquamarine water that emerges from the stage, from which our shipwrecked Viola and Sebastian are spewed out. This causes quite a stir with the audience - exactly how do the actors get in there from underneath the stage without making a sound? Designer Jon Bausor has a lot to be proud of.
Equally commendable is the costume design by Laura Hunt. A wonderful combination of 1940s classics and contemporary pieces work to distinguish the inhabitants of Illyria from its foreign visitors. Donning wide-leg trousers and braces, the men of Illyria are juxtaposed to the Topman-clad Sebastian and ‘Cesario’. Hunt’s costumes highlight the fact that Sebastian and Viola are strangers in a new land, effectively emphasising the key theme of displacement in the play.
The comedy too is inescapable. Constant references to our modern world work to the play’s advantage. Shakespeare’s poetry is contrasted to the ordinariness of contemporary life and the world of the play becomes a wonderful mesh of magic flecked with truth; Villain Malvolio riding in on a beeping golf buggy is a great cure for the blues.
Wickedly funny and beautifully composed, Twelfth Night can also boast stellar acting. Everyone is consistently good but Jonathan Slinger is brilliant. His Malvolio makes the audience cringe with his drawn out sniggers and stomach churning smirks. Nicholas Day’s drunken Toby Belch can barely be separated from something you might see in a grimy pub on a Friday night and Kevin McMonagle is enchanting to watch as Feste. Playing the wise man shrouded in a veil of foolishness, he is able to lift his own disguise as the jester to reveal the deeper truths at the heart of this play. 
Twlefth Night runs at The Roundhouse until 5th July
RSC The Comedy of Errors at The Roundhouse
GATZ at Noel Coward Theatre
Comedy, totalitarianism and Habima: An interview with Amir Nizar Zuabi
Add an event
Scoping Out London’s Coolest Historic Bingo Halls
London’s bingo halls were once a bustling part of many of the city’s communities, but as...