80s look takes Bard back to the future
Review
by William Shakespeare, directed by Mel Cook for Summer Shakespeare, Victoria Esplanade Rose Gardens, until March 7. Reviewed by Richard Mays.
Open access to Shakespeare is seldom more engaging.
What could be more artfully festive than awarm summer’s eve in the Esplanade rose gardens accompanied by the Bard’s inimitable characters, their freewheeling capers and cleverly contrived cavorting?
Hawaiian shirts and pastel hues reign and with its own live 80s music DJ, this colourful Shakespearean romcom resembles a Lost and Found meets The Bachelorette meets Marriage At First Sight mash-up – only with amuch better script.
Repletewith missing twins, crossdressing disguises, mistaken identity, misplaced affections, romantic delusion and instant marriage, this fun back-to-the-80s flavoured timewarp hits the spot.
Key to the production is director Mel Cook’s astute casting.
With great glee and gusto, Toby Lockhart’s Feste the singing jester presides over revels largely driven by Phil White’s articulately drunken Sir Toby Belch, in cahoots with Shivarn Stewart’s vivacious Maria, Lady Olivia’s PA.
The conniving couple have targeted Olivia’s household steward, the overbearing Malvolio, for a canny payback practical joke.
Jack Eden provides masterful vocal projection and presence as the hapless about-to-be-humiliated majordomo.
Meanwhile Olivia, in an eyecatching portrayal by Lisa Swinbanks, is fending off the romantic overtures of Feidhlim Hall’s besotted Duke Orsino.
Twelfth Night
Instead, Olivia falls for Cesario, the Duke’s young and articulate emissary, not realising that ‘‘he’’ is Viola, a shipwrecked young woman in disguise convinced her twin brother Sebastian has perished at sea.
Secretly in love with the Duke, Sasha Lipinsky brings precisely the pluck and physicality required to be convincing in this pivotal double-minded, sexually ambivalent role.
However, notwithstanding the romantic outcome, its vividly posed vignettes, or the calibre of its cast, this 1. What are the colours on the Chinese flag: red and green, red and gold or green and gold?
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3. The former
British colonies of Tanganyika and Zanzibar merged in 1964 to form what country?
4. Who or what are Fine Gael and Fianna Fail?
5. What was unusual about the casts of the films Lawrence of Arabia, The Great Escape, 12 Angry Men and The Lord of the Flies?
6. What was the nationality of former United States president Barack Obama’s father?
7. Complete the following couplet from a poem: ‘‘I think that I shall never see/a poem lovely as ... ‘‘
8. Who is New Zealand’s top-ranked male international golfer?
9. What was the surname of a New Zealand writer named Elsie whose son Keith was a Green Partymp?
10. What staple item of women’s fashion has the initials LBD?