The Bard with a drag queen? It’s pure magic
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s Globe) Verdict: Joyous ★★★★★ Woyzeck (The Old Vic) Verdict: Miserable ★★✩✩✩
THOSE timid bores on the board at Shakespeare’s Globe should drop their chins in shame.
They have sacked artistic director Emma Rice for being too go-ahead but in this, her final show, she gives us the most entertaining, exciting Twelfth Night for years.
You could never call this production cod-medieval or traditional (which is what the Globe wants). It has disco dancing, newly-added lines and a vast, bearded drag queen playing Feste, whose role has been altered to that of an ethereal mistress of ceremonies rather than a court jester.
The drag queen, name of Le Gateau Chocolat, has a beard, gold dress and hairy back and has a singing voice as deep as the Blackwall tunnel.
Making liberal changes to Shakespeare’s text, the show opens with white-uniformed naval matelots doing a hornpipe before the shipwreck in which twins Viola and Sebastian are separated.
This production has sprightly music. Orsino (Joshua Lacey, looking like Bruce Springsteen) keeps doing Irish jigs. The Wind And The Rain is beautifully folksy. There is even a dance number of We Are Family.
Kate Owen is superb — fantastic, ace, whatever superlative you like — as Malvolio. Tiny Miss Owen, a great collaborator of Miss Rice, makes the butler a strutting Welsh midget with a dodgy wig, moustache and whistle with which to boss Olivia’s household. Shades of Ronnie Corbett playing a martinet. At one point Malvolio leaps up into the arms of his statuesque mistress (Annette McLaughlin, about twice Miss Owen’s height). It is like seeing a Jack Russell jump on to a sofa.
Meanwhile, Tony Jayawardena’s kilted Sir Toby Belch whacks golf balls into the audience and Marc Antolin is all pink-coated and camp, his sword-fight with Viola being turned into a boxing match with supersize gloves.
It may all sound mad and a bit silly, but it is wonderfully refreshing. And, having this week said goodbye to my dearlyloved sister Penny, I found its fantastical magic both uplifting and moving.
Let us hope someone else (the troubled RSC?) can
give Emma Rice a chance to bring her rare touch to more Shakespeare.
WATCH a man go mad for two hours: that is the basic proposition of The Old Vic’s latest offering, a reworking of Georg Buchner’s 1836 soldier story, Woyzeck.
The German dramatist’s original work showed us the lumpen infantryman’s miserable lot, lacking food, money and motivation. Setting the tale in 1981 Berlin, as Jack Thorne’s version does, may make it groovier, but there is a cost. The plot becomes less plausible. The draw here is John Boyega as Woyzeck.
LONDONER Boyega is hot property as a star of the latest Star Wars films. It would be unfair to judge his stage capabilities from this gloomily lit, miserable production. He is a beefy lad with a certain stage presence, but he could do with coughing up his lines more clearly.
Nancy Carroll is the best of the cast, doubling as Woyzeck’s mother and the over-sexed wife of the Captain (an unconvincing Steffan Rhodri).
From Ben Batt we have soldier Andrews, who does sentry duty with Woyzeck and spends his spare time servicing the military wives. Mr Batt (Mr Butt, more accurately) bares all, winning a wolf whistle from one moron on opening night.
A silly Old Vic crowd also gave a round of applause after Andrews and Miss Carroll’s character did some violent, vivid, foul-mouthed coupling at the start of the second half.
Tom Scutt’s design cleverly uses 15 sections of panel which could be sections of Berlin Wall or the linings to a padded cell.
Director Joe Murphy has certainly come up with striking visuals, but they are pushed too far when blood and guts spill from the panels. The show fails to give us any reason to like Woyzeck. Nor is it evident why it has any relevance today.
Any observations here about post-traumatic stress and childhood abuse have been said more clearly and memorably elsewhere.