BWW Reviews: TWELFTH NIGHT, Greenwich Theatre, 17 January 2012

Teenage girl posed as boy... screamed the headline the day after Twelfth Night started its run at Greenwich Theatre (until 21 January), which just goes to show that The Bard may have shuffled off this mortal coil 396 years ago, but he knew a bit about what animates human beings - any human beings.

A fortnight on from Twelfth Night 2012, the stage is wintry, bleak, with just a few denuded Christmas trees and discarded toys to suggest the festivities are over and Spring still a long way off. Soon, much of that weight of melancholy is lifted by sassy, sexy Viola who dons a man's attire (if not quite his ways and certainly not his desires) and wreaks havoc in the courts of the world-weary Duke of Orsini and the shrewish Countess Olivia. Cross-dressing, cross garters and a very cross servant all come and go and all's well that ends well... or is it?

The Movement are a company of young actors and that can show in somewhat uneven performances. Tom Hartill does a fine turn as an Oliver Reedish Sir Toby Belch and Sarah Winter (pictured) is properly unconvincing as Cesario with plenty of Viola bursting through her disguise - but Ben Blyth's Malvolio is the standout. Though priggish, vain and haughty, Blyth's servant elicits as much sympathy as contempt when fooled into donning the yellow culottes and garters the better to woo his plainly uninterested Countess. His innocence and garish smile makes his later incarceration for madness and swearing of revenge, all the more terrible. Now most definitely sans culottes, Malvolio's warning to those wealthier, cleverer and more confident than him, had just a echo of 1789 about it to my ear.

With no programme available and a cast of actors at times looking and sounding more alike than one might expect, this production can be tricky to follow at times, especially with some lines a little rushed and spoken away from the audience. Though many of Greenwich Theatre's patrons will have studied - or be studying - Twelfth Night, Shakespeare was (and always should be) popular entertainment and, in this bleak new year, a little help for those of us new to the work would not go amiss!  

Twelfth Night is on tour until 26 January.