Hello, stylish, sexy sailor in a seductive show, but do get on with it!
Twelfth Night
Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, NW1
★★★★✩
STYLISH and surprisingly sexy, in the style of a Pierre et Gilles photograph or a Jean Paul Gaultier perfume ad, Owen Horsley’s production leans heavily into the themes of sexual and gender confusion in Shakespeare’s play. His staging is witty and seductive, only marred by an almost willful lack of pace. Here,
Raphael Bushay’s bluff and uncomfortable Count Orsino, white-uniformed as an officer and a gentleman, goes to woo the lady Olivia (Anna Francolini, pictured) not at her house but at the smoky, nautical-themed, midcentury-modern gay club that bears her name. Her uncle Sir Toby Belch (Michael Matus) is the blowsy, boozy, in-house drag queen. Her fool Feste (Julie Legrand) is the androgynous singer/host. Shipwrecked twins Viola (Evelyn Miller) and Sebastian (Andro Cowperthwaite) are washed separately up at Olivia’s door, the former dressing as a boy to enter Orsino’s service, the latter with an adoring mariner in tow. Dressed in wide-legged trousers and abbreviated matelot jackets, they look like supermodels. Hello, sailor! The idea of role-playing is prominent. Francolini’s Olivia is first seen ostentatiously grieving her late brother, but she becomes performatively kittenish when smitten with the disguised Viola, and vampily joins the onstage band for one of the show’s nine musical numbers.
Francolini’s is a grandstanding comic performance, which means she’s robbed of pathos at the end. Matus’s fag-chewing, corset-straining Belch is nicely paired with Matthew Spencer, resembling a young and shiny-suited David Cameron as Olivia’s hapless suitor Aguecheek, and Anita Reynolds’s mischievous Maria.
But man, does this show drag sometimes. You spend the first half amused, intrigued, and sometimes delightfully wrong-footed but wishing Horsley would just, please, hurry things up. The second act is pacier but the ending is interminably distended. If your cast are expressive rather than splendid singers, a post-bow encore that pushes the show close to three hours really isn’t a good idea.
• To June 8; openairtheatre.com