If…
Gemma Bodinetz’s exuberant inaugural production of Twelfth Night in the magnificent new Everyman underlines the dreamlike, fairy-tale nature of Shakespeare’s comedy by having Orsino repeat the play’s opening-word three times. What if gender expectations were turned inside out? What if social hierarchies were turned upside down? What if dreams could come true?
Those three words are spoken before a coup de theatre in which the shipwrecked Viola is vomited forth from the water onto the stage of Illyria. One of the many pleasures of this productions is the sense you have of the Everyman company enjoying playing with their new toolbox of stage devices which enables actors to literally swim on stage, allows hanging baskets to descend from the heavens, and for elaborately garlanded arches to be extended across the rear of the stage.
But make no mistake: the technical capabilities are not overdone, and the focus remains firmly in the Everyman tradition on the actors, ensemble playing, and on exploiting the advantages of actors being in close proximity to the audience on the familiar, restored thrust stage.
Artistic director Gemma Bodinetz has said she wanted this inaugural show to be an ensemble piece and it is certainly that, bringing together Matthew Kelly as Sir Toby Belch and Nick Woodeson (Malvolio) from the classic Everyman company of 1974 (they’re at the front in the iconic photo taken that year) with a fantastic cast of seasoned and younger players who grab with both hands the opportunities offered by a play that brims with great individual parts.
If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it…
Bodinetz has spoken, too, of the appropriateness of the play’s themes to the Everyman: freedom of spirit, naughtiness, and love. It’s rooted in Elizabethan Twelfth Night customs (and appears to have been first performed on Twelfth Night in 1602). The festival of Epiphany, 12 days after Christmas, was traditionally a time for merry-making, for pranks and disguises. This is the atmosphere of Illyria – a land where individuals love to distraction, and excess of love, drink and renegade spirit leads to confusion and not a little madness.
Written sometime between 1599 and 1601 (just before he embarked on Hamlet), Twelfth Night is considered by many to represent Shakespeare’s greatest romantic comedy. Like the post-Christmas feast of its title, the play is a joyful occasion for merrymaking, topsy-turvy reversal, and misrule. Twelfth Night brought the Christmas holiday to a close (at one point the cast sing a capering ‘Twelve Days of Christmas’), and the comic spirit of the occasion was that of the world turned upside down. The feast was traditionally presided over by a Lord of Misrule whose role was to depose whoever was in authority and to instigate some sort of carnivalesque disorder (I’m reminded of the time I experienced Women’s Carnival day in Cologne, when women symbolically assume power over their male-counterparts, playing pranks on men by cutting off their ties).
In the programme there’s a quote from literary critic LG Salinger that captures perfectly the carnival atmosphere of the play; there is, he writes:
A prolonged season of misrule, or ‘uncivil rule’, in Olivia’s household, with Sir Toby turning night into day; there are drinking, dancing and singing, scenes of mock wooing, a mock sword fight, and the gulling of an unpopular member of the household, with Feste mumming it as a priest and attempting a mock exorcism in the manner of the Feast of Fools.
What could be more Everyman? Director and players have captured the play’s transgressive nature with a joyous energy, and though some critics complained about the length of the performance (well over three hours), the time just flies. As Liz Lacey aptly concluded on the Seven Streets blog:
It struck me throughout that Twelfth Night is a most fitting choice of play for a Liverpool theatre and audience; it is soaked with music and riddled with wordplay, high emotions and romantic delusions abound, along with mischief and a spirit of joyous anarchy… all qualities we understand locally, and export in large amounts. The all-singing, all dancing finale makes a statement of intent…’We strive to please you every day’. In this city of entertainment, excitement, melancholy and mirth, we could do worse than adopt this as a civic motto, and the Everyman has already set it to music for us.
‘I am not what I am’
This is a play about transformation, the ambiguity of gender roles, about imagining other worlds, other possibilities. So many characters assume disguises, beginning with Viola (Jodie McNee, looking extraordinarily like kd Lang), who dons a blue trouseer suit and convinces Orsino and everyone else that she is a man. McNee’s is an impressive performance, her reincarnation as a young man observed with attention to detail, such as the way she, like her brother Sebastian brushes back her hair.
Matthew Kelly as Sir Toby Belch, Paul Duckworth as Feste and Adam Keast as Sir Andrew Aguecheek
Local actors were outstanding: Pauline Daniels as Olivia’s lady in waiting Maria, Adam Keast as the mincing Sir Andrew Aguecheek (he reminded me of Rik Mayall), and especially Paul Duckworth as Feste, drag queen, clown and musician. Music plays an important part in Twelfth Night, and the production features several excellent arrangements of the songs by Peter Coyte, including two versions of ‘Come away’, one sung by Feste, the other by a spotlit Jodie McNee as Viola:
Come away, come away, death,
And in sad cypress let me be laid;
Fly away, fly away breath;
I am slain by a fair cruel maid.
My shroud of white, stuck all with yew,
O, prepare it!
My part of death, no one so true
Did share it.
Not a flower, not a flower sweet
On my black coffin let there be strown;
Not a friend, not a friend greet
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown:
A thousand thousand sighs to save,
Lay me, O, where
Sad true lover never find my grave,
To weep there!
One detail: all through the early scenes, in a chair at the back of the stage, sleeps a priest who wakes with a start occasionally when someone gives him a poke or a kick. It reminded me of Father Jack in Father Ted.
There’s something of The Winter’s Tale about this play, with its joyful resolutions. Then, with Feste’s last song, we are ushered back to the imperfect world of the everyday where ‘the rain it raineth every day’. But Gemma Bodinetz gives us a joyous finale of streamers and balloons as the cast sing heartily:
A great while ago the world begun,
With hey, ho,
But that’s all one, our play is done,
And we’ll strive to please you every day.
And with that promise, I see perfectly why Bodinetz chose this for the opening show. The result is one of the best Shakespeare productions I’ve seen.
We’ve got the Everyman back. How good is that?
Exit
That's How The Light Gets In 
Gemma’s comments on Twelfth Night were so insightful and heartening. Thank you for posting this. A wonderful memory for you, a new interest for me.