Drama
TWELFTH NIGHT by William Shakespeare
The Bacon Theatre: Main School Play, Michaelmas Term 2013
A beautiful English Forsteresque garden with a lovelorn young man rocking back and forth on a
swing. A beach with children playing ball and their elders entertaining themselves. Idyllic scenes
open, always to be interrupted by the rain that “raineth every day”.
In his programme note for the October 2013 production of Twelfth Night, Lloyd Allington aptly
flagged up not only the complex character of this play, with its intermingling of humour and cruelty,
loss and fulfilment, but also its tangential connections with “Shakespeare’s greatest tragedy, King
Lear”. A world where “there is no darkness but ignorance”. Ignorance of others. Ignorance of
ourselves.
The production was nostalgically set in the latter half of the Twentieth Century: Sir Andrew
Aguecheek recalling a teddy boy style, Sir Toby Belch in old-fashioned plus-fours (appropriately
higher up the cultural ladder than Aguecheek, but not so far as to put him out of reach of the blowsy
Maria), Olivia rather splendidly not unlike Jackie Onassis, Orsino a British memory of Gatsby – and so
on. All of those production references, of course, hinting in their various ways at aspiration and
competition, conflict and uncertainty, love and possession, harshness.
I had seen no performance in the Bacon Theatre in fifteen years until this one. How did the play go?
What has happened to DCS drama across that decade and a half?
Above all, it is striking how DCS drama under Lloyd Allington and Rebecca Vines has become a fully
and naturally professionalised experience. Here was a performance characterised by theatrical
competence in almost every respect. Any memory of a school ‘am-dram’ sensation had been left far
behind. Technically faultless. The troupe worked together, as a troupe. Projection, articulation,
timing had all become second nature for these actors. Lighting, sound, the set, props, even the
costume changes (not least the lightning-fast changes of the main character pairs for Feste’s final
song) – all deft.
And if I found the overall effect convincing and uplifting, I took away with me many special individual
memories of some fine young actors.
Supported by bizarrely serried ranks of co-mourners (the faintest of echoes of Mead’s 1996 The
House of Bernarda Alba?), Amy Porter as Olivia caught the sensitivity and yet the absurdity of her
excessive mourning for her lost brother. She begins in love with grief itself, only subsequently to
catch herself unawares when her own need for love wells up uncontrollably. Charles Coombs as
Orsino had a presence and dignity well matched to the part, growing the character across five acts
from someone obsessed with a frequently-recumbent “fancy” that is “high fantastical”, where he is
in love with love, to one of maturity partnered and led by the revealed Viola.
In what is in some ways the most demanding of the play’s parts, Jake Deasy as Malvolio, Olivia’s
steward, convincingly pulled off that real challenge of establishing the role as the absurdly self-loving
and pompous “turkey-cock” whom we reject but nevertheless empathise with. We agree with Sir
Toby: “Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” We
relish Malvolio’s duping. But Jake built the inner vulnerability of the character, so that as the play
progressed we felt for him the pain of his cruel and humiliating incarceration in a madman’s cell. The
litmus-test of Jake’s success in this part was the audience’s expression of discomforted fellow-feeling
with him when he struggles vainly to manage his outrage and to regain his self-respect (“I’ll be
revenged on the whole pack of you”), before exiting with such damaged dignity as could be
mustered.
The gull/knave double-act of Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek is another demandingly multilayered phenomenon of the play. Max Evans, a gormlessly Welsh Aguecheek, successfully caught all
the intermingled gullibility, cowardice, matey-ness and wistfulness of the character, effectively
echoing in his own departure the complexity of Malvolio’s last moments. And Stephen Whitford
carried off the play’s longest part, that of Sir Toby Belch, as the boisterous reprobate who too comes
to an understanding of his own excesses: “I would we were well rid of this knavery.” Another journey
of self-learning.
And within this fine set of performances in the Bacon Theatre, Beth Leishman as Viola and Sam
Wheatley as Feste the jester were outstanding. Beth effortlessly captured the tender yet
psychologically mature vulnerability of this most admirable of all the play’s characters. “Jocund, apt
and willing”, she is the only one capable of resisting the tendency to “kill what [we] love”. Through
the evening, she managed that most difficult of dramatics tasks – making dramatically meaningful
sense of the female/male gender confusion so that the beauty of the text shone through without
distraction. In a way that was at the core of the character, Beth had an understated poise and stage
presence that, above all, enabled those around her- both as characters in the play and as actors – to
achieve self-realisation.
Lastly, Sam Wheatley provided the penetrative interpreter of all around him: involved in the
dramatic action, even to culpability, yet critically (and self-critically) detached: a melancholic joker,
with a keen sense of morality and mortality. And as a singer, Sam ranged from the raucously
inebriated to the most mournful of crooners. Watch the career of this young man. And at the same
time, watch the career of Jason Richards, the composer/performer who wrote and played all the
music – a talent that is astonishing now, and will surely be notable in time to come.
Twelfth Night is a play in which all things unexpectedly conspire and combine together, for ill and for
good, imperfectly mixed. Lloyd Allington and Rebecca Vines, in lifting drama at DCS beyond
recognition across the years, have given us an evening’s insight into one of Shakespeare’s most
captivating plays, one that says much to us of what it is to be a human being.
Stephen Aiano