Poetry and passion make this a night to remember

Twelfth Night

Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh

TO ANYONE who went to university in the early 1970s, there’s something eerily familiar about the opening scene of Wils Wilson’s new Lyceum production of Twelfth Night, co-produced with Bristol Old Vic. The big, old Edwardian or Victorian house that’s cheap because of its dilapidation, the crowds of young people bent on partying for days on end, and above all the clothes, from sharp business suits satirically worn, to wildly flared jeans, glittering platform shoes, and trailing dresses and kaftans worn with elaborate eye makeup, by both sexes.

The influence of Bowie and of the Mick Jagger film Performance therefore looms large, as Wilson’s 12-strong company find an old copy of Twelfth Night, and start allocating roles. Dawn Sievewright’s startling but often brilliant Toby Belch is a young woman in a three-piece suit, and the twins Sebastian and Viola are played with terrific flair by a small pale Scot (Joanne Thomson) and a black Londoner (a radiant Jade Ogugua); while composer and musician Meilyr Jones floats the stage in a drifty rainbow gown, helping to deliver a score that ranges from beautiful, trippy versions of the play’s magical songs to a glam-rock number for the transformed Malvolio so excruciating, in its cross-gartered agony, that it’s genuinely hard to watch.

All of which helps to reveal three things, the first being that there’s nothing here that does any actual violence to Shakespeare’s play; the idea of cross-gender casting is written into the grain of this script, and into its ambivalent and melancholy attitude to sexual attraction. The second is that if there is a game being played, then Malvolio is the one character who must not be part of it; Christopher Green has some powerful moments as the