Review: TWELFTH NIGHT, Shakespeare's Globe

‘This is Illyria,’ bellows the sea captain conveying the shipwrecked Viola to shore, in what is surely one of Shakespeare’s most straightforward opening lines. In Robin Belfield’s new production, that triumphant declaration serves as an introduction not just to Twelfth Night’s fictional Balkan setting, but also to the rich visual universe Belfield has conjured up onstage.

With an accompanying flourish from the brass band upstage, the audience is at once transported to a riotous carnival of colour. Here abound robes and feathered headdresses in lurid hues, campy mourning garb that looks like something out of The Traitors, and even a Wicker Man-esque oversized scarecrow with some surprisingly emotive facial expressions. The famous yellow cross-gartered stockings the steward Malvolio gets tricked into wearing are actually among designer Lydia Hardiman’s least eye-catching items of costume.

As one might predict early on, this escapist, more-is-more approach to costumes and music means that this production shines most brightly when it’s at its silliest. The subplot about the deception of Malvolio is played with virtuosic physical comedy and audience participation that never feels self-indulgent, while the decision to cast the drunkard Sir Toby Belch (Jocelyn Jee Esien) as a woman lends a surprising emotional depth to the relationship between Belch and the maidservant Maria (Alison Halstead). The hijinks are accompanied by Simon Slater’s infectious folk-pop arrangements, which lend a fresh vitality to Shakespeare’s wordplay.

Unfortunately, though, Twelfth Night, or What You Will is very much a play of two halves – the joyous role subversion of Twelfth Night needs to be balanced out by the emotional ambiguity of What You Will. Belfield’s direction too often allows the complex, gender-bending love triangle between Viola (in disguise as ‘Cesario’), Olivia and Orsino to play second fiddle to the Saturnalian slapstick.

In a production that focuses so much on constructing an alternate universe, it’s a shame that our audience avatar, Viola (Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ), the only character who’s experiencing this fantasy world for the first time alongside us, isn’t played with more depth. Viola’s outsider status on multiple levels – as an abandoned woman in a foreign land, performing gender transgressively in a charged erotic situation – ought to provide the play with a rich emotional core, but Adékọluẹ́jọ never really moves the complexities of Viola’s assumption of a male identity past generic comic machismo.

Without Viola as a convincing anchor, many of the triangle’s scenes fall flat. Laura Hanna’s Olivia prioritises goofy self-deprecation over the development of believable romantic feelings, while the developing tension between Viola and Orsino (Solomon Israel) feels underplayed, and overshadowed by an extended musical number in the same scene.

This being said, there are tantalising hints of an understanding of something more profound in the text. The relationship between Viola’s twin brother Sebastian (Kwami Odoom) and his rescuer Antonio (Max Keeble) is made explicitly romantic here, lending a depth and implied shared history to a pair of characters who only really appear towards the end of the play.

Pearce Quigley’s version of Malvolio is a clear crowdpleaser – his deadpan Yorkshire accent is subdued enough to not fall into the tired trope of regional dialects played for comic effect – but also manages to be imbued with a certain melancholy, such that the character’s final call for revenge feels ominous rather than satisfying.

When we exit the dreamworld, with a quick final musical number to round things off, there’s a sense of the emptiness that hits right after you come home from a particular kind of holiday – you’ve had some fun in warmer climes, but not left with any earth-shattering cultural reflections. This production might not probe Twelfth Night’s nuances as far as it could, but even the most hardened critic can’t resist the serotonin hit.

Twelfth Night plays at Shakespeare's Globe until 25 October

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