A world full of Sir Tobys
The contemporary resonances are not hard to find in Gordon Barr’s wonderful Twelfth Night for Bard in the Botanics
Theatre lost, theatre found again – slowly, tentatively, and in the kinds of outdoor settings that Shakespeare himself would surely have recognised, perhaps with a wry smile. In Glasgow last Friday night, the atmosphere suddenly lifted after a sultry, overcast day, offering blue skies and gorgeous evening sunlight; and to a huge cheer, Gordon Barr’s wonderful Bard in the Botanics company took to their outdoor stage, at the bottom of a beautiful sloping lawn beside the glasshouses in Glasgow’s Botanic Gardens, after an unprecedented two-year break.
Lost and found is the chosen title for this year’s reduced two-play season, taking place only outdoors, in front of audiences deftly divided into household groups each sitting in its own little distanced square; and the first play up is the joyful and complex Twelfth Night (✪✪✪✪), a comedy full of sadness, ambiguity and poetry, as well as some mighty laughs, as the heroine Viola – “what country, friends, is this?” – faces up to the loss of everything she has known, and gradually discovers a new life in the strange land of Illyria.
To say that Barr’s company make light work of the play is the highest praise; in the sense that none of its huge technical and emotional demands are in any way beyond their reach. Stephanie Mcgregor is a sturdy and moving Viola, Nicole
Cooper a beautiful Olivia with a fine sense of poetry, Adam Donaldson a perfectly pitched Sir Toby Belch, and Alan Steele a superb Malvolio, pained, angry and ominous. In a week of football madness when the great English tradition of celebratory drunkenness has been much in evidence, there is a real contemporary edge to the argument between the libertine Sir Toby – “dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” – and the puritanical steward who “thinks nobly of the soul”, and believes that human beings should behave better; and as England abandons compulsory mask-wearing, to the delight of all the country’s Sir Tobys, it’s a debate that still divides the nation, captured by Shakespeare with a timeless brilliance that both exhilarates, and sounds a warning.
Last week, on the riverside lawn, the Pitlochry Festival Theatre company opened its newproduction of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind In The Willows (✪✪✪), set to run until September; and what with the theatre’s merry little bandstand (doubling here as everything from Badger’s house to the local jail), a boat-like structure down towards the water, and the nearby woodland putting in a fine performance as the Wildwood, the setting does the story proud, and creates a truly delightful afternoon experience for audience members of all ages.
For me, the main problem with the show lies in Mark Powell’s adaptation, which takes a bit of a sledgehammer to the task of moulding Grahame’s story to a modern environmental and social justice agenda. It’s an interpretation the story can bear very comfortably, of course; Grahame’s central character Mr Toad is a veritable Sir Toby of the animal world, determined to drive his motor car to the destruction of himself and everyone else. It’s simply that Powell inviting Grahame’s characters to “check their privilege” sits very awkwardly on the the timeless quality of the story.
Whatever the ups and downs of the text, though, an energetic sevenstrong cast – directed by Pitlochry artistic director Elizabeth Newman and her associate Ben Occhipinti, and led by Colin Mccredie as Mr Toad – make a tremendous, generous and affable job of delivering it to the audience. And they are greatly supported by Occhipinti’s joyful score, beautifully sung and arranged, which celebrates the life of the riverbank in one of Scotland iconic riverside settings.
A five-minute walk up the hill from the river, meanwhile, in
Ferguson delivers the monologue with an irresistible combination of quiet skill and pure emotional nakedness
the company’s new woodland amphitheatre, last weekend saw a sadly brief series of performances by leading Scottish actor Brian Ferguson of Dostoevsky’s early short story White Nights (✪✪✪✪). Set in 1840s St Petersburg, the story – adapted and directed here by Newman – tells of a single moment of bliss in the life of a 36 year-old bachelor, who meets a beautiful young woman one night by the river, and falls in love with her even while she embraces him as a friend and brother, telling him the story of her love for another man.
Alone on a bench, Ferguson delivers the monologue with an irresistible combination of quiet skill and pure emotional nakedness, baring his character’s vulnerable soul with a vividness that sears the heart. That Dostoevsky is a magnificent writer goes without saying; his portrayal of this young man contains layer upon layer of observation and questioning of what a man really means, when he says that he loves a woman, or wants to possess her. And in Ferguson’s performance, that writing meets its match; inspiring hopes that this beautiful 70-minute show will find a longer life.