Rice confounds those expecting a shipwreck
Emma Rice’s production of Twelfth Night, her main-stage swansong at Shakespeare’s Globe, is essential viewing. Telegraph critic Dominic Cavendish says it is, in fact, essence of Rice. “Ploughing full-steam ahead, waving not drowning, with larkiness ahoy – the maritime metaphors are there for the taking from the start, as she preludes Shakespeare’s tale of shipwreck, and engulfing confusions of love and identity, by conjuring on-board merriment prior to calamity.”
Twelfth Night Shakespeare’s Globe, SE1
This is a real collector’s item. It’s only a year since the good ship Emma Rice set sail at the Globe – bound for new horizons, seeking to make fresh discoveries – but her artistic directorship foundered when barely out of harbour. It was announced last October that, despite strong box office returns and a healthy enough critical response, she would be moving on in April 2018; at issue, her favouring of stage-focused (rather than audience “shared”) lighting and amplified sound.
Which means that this production of Twelfth Night is her main-stage swansong, albeit that her much-loved Tristan and Yseult will have a run in June. And whether you’re a believer, a sceptic, or haven’t got around to seeing what all the fuss is about or are even, dare I say it, a “hater” in need of confirmation of your relief at her forthcoming departure, I’d say this show is essential viewing.
It is, in fact, essence of Rice: ploughing full-steam ahead, waving not drowning, with larkiness ahoy
– the maritime metaphors are there for the taking from the start, as she preludes Shakespeare’s tale of shipwreck, and engulfing confusions of love and identity, by conjuring on-board merriment prior to calamity. We’re on “SS Unity”, and the crew, in spick-and-span whites, move in synchronised delight to the ministrations of a slightly out-of-sight but rarely out of earshot band, who then up the disco beat with a round of Sister Sledge’s We Are Family.
Never mind women and children first – where’s the text? Only surfacing about 10 minutes in, I reckon, and even then subject to some chopping, with the flotsam and jetsam of Feste’s lines bobbing amid a great slick of songs for this largely reconceived clown, played by black drag-artiste Le Gateau Chocolat, who looms over proceedings and is at once magnificent, scary and hairy with false-eyelashes, afro wig, bushy beard, sequinned gown and submarine-deep voice.
Watching the cast flapping whiteflags in semaphore – just before the gangplank of Lez Brotherston’s set comes crashing symbolically to the ground (the hazardous showing-off loosely “inspired” apparently by the 2012 Costa Concordia disaster) – I couldn’t help waving my own flag in surrender.
Is this a poignant Twelfth Night? Not really; it’s so intent on milking every scene for mirth it has a holiday-camp feel, even though Illyria has supposedly been re-imagined as a Scottish island in the Seventies. Yet it achieves what critics of this new regime have found too often wanting – a joyous complicity between player and space, and a warm audience rapport. If it doesn’t fully honour Shakespeare, it makes the most of the Globe.
As with the recent Tamsin Greig Twelfth Night along the river at the National, the star of the night is a Malvolio played by an actress: here the boyish, impish Katy Owen gives us a mustachioed Welsh steward who runs proceedings like a whistle-blowing stationmaster before going hilariously off the rails in wooing his mistress (Annette Mclaughlin), even hanging off a pillar like a sex-mad chimp. Owen, every bone a funny one, is simply the biggest hoot on the London stage.
Among a heap of fine performances, Anita-joy Uwajeh impresses as the grief-stricken, gender-switching Viola, fending off the gropes of Joshua Lacey’s smarmy, self-adoring Orsino; and so does a kilted Tony Jayawardena as Belch (attended by a lispingly fey, trouser-dropping Marc Antolin as Aguecheek). Sir Toby drives tennisballs into the groundlings with a golf-club and augments his lines with Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. A liberty-taking cheek, yes, but isn’t that defiant message one for us all, never mind Rice, in this of all weeks?