Tickling the Merchant Ivories
Twelfth Night Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon
Irealised, to my mild horror watching Christopher Luscombe’s RSC main-stage revival of Twelfth
Night (having had no time to glance at the programme), that I had forgotten it starred Adrian Edmondson as Malvolio. And that the pompous, puritanical, lordly disdainful steward coldly passing contemptuous judgment on the fool Feste was the comic deity I had worshipped years ago as the forehead-studded, head-case punk Vyvyan in The Young Ones.
It’s a gaunter, sadder-looking figure that Edmondson confronts us with, and yet the mischief that the actor brimmed over with in his prime persists to this day. He possesses a hypnotic quality of unpredictability: clenched fists, targeted glances that have the force of head-butts, smiles that drag mirth against its will. He flits about alone in Olivia’s drawing room, strumming a banjo to sing the specially exhumed Elizabethan ditty Please One
and So Please All, getting more carried away with every round of applause, until the whole household gathers at a doorway to gawp in disbelief at him.
That household is a late-victorian one. Luscombe’s conceit is that we’re in the age of decadence, the age of empire; Viola and her separated twin, Sebastian (Dinita Gohil and Esh Alladi), are Indians adrift in a nation of opulent, Orient-enriched consumption. To bring home the Wildean point of aestheticism, the action has been carved into “town” and “country” scenes, with dashing to the station an added quirky feature.
It’s ingenious but, as with Malvolio’s personality, there’s something a little self-admiring about this transposition, a feeling that the director is tickling the Merchant Ivories, as it were. The lavish country-house settings proved inspired for his superlative Edwardian/great War Love’s Labour’s Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. But by returning to a class-bound, hierarchical England, with supportingly evocative lush compositions from Nigel Hess, he’s in danger of looking like a one-trick pony. And the ire displayed by Beruce Khan as Feste (restyled as Olivia’s turbanwearing munshi) isn’t a savage enough counterweight to the cosy picture of servants and colourfully attired immigrants attending monied gentry.
John Hodgkinson delivers a great parcel of comic joy as a hulking but never cuddly (often flatulent) Belch, with Michael Cochrane (Oliver on The Archers), making his RSC debut at the age of 70, a hoot as old Aguecheek. Brainlessly happy, he put me in mind of a dog poking his head out of the window of a moving car, and his delightful turn alone is worth heading to Stratford to catch.
This review appeared in some earlier editions