Ulistings between theaters appear to include fewer pantomimes, possibly due to cultural sensitivities about sexual innuendo and satirical female cross-dressing. Their absence encouraged multiple takes on A Christmas Carol while the National recast itself How important it is to be sincere as a dazzling adult panto. Another possibility is Twelfth Night, which is about to open at the RSC but is underwhelmed by the small but magnificent Orange Tree.
Despite its title hinting at the end of the Christmas season, Shakespeare’s bittersweet 1602 comedy. of Deception and Revenge is not a December-January narrative tale and includes a reference to ‘midsummer’, but it could easily be winterized. Tom Littler, Richmond’s artistic director, sets it in the late 1940s, soon after a November commemoration, his characters decked out in medals and mourning the war dead.
Shakespeare is such a generous writer that Lears can be displaced by Fools or Othello overshadowed by Lagos. However, it is startling to find that Twelfth Night is dominated by Feste, a minor clown mentioned only once in the folio text. Pairing him with the equally young Curio, Littler makes the character central, with actor-musician Stefan Bednarczyk, master of revelry, seated at a slow-rolling central piano from which he picks out storms and church bells and sings wonderful settings from the semi- Feste a dozen songs as cast members take to his instrument. This approach is textually justified by Feste’s relation to the audience, but Bednarczyk, with spoken lines to match the sung ones, is a revelation.
The script is almost high enough to qualify as a song play. Everyone twice agrees that someone buys a dozen seasonal gifts for their love, although mysteriously (and antimetrically) those gifts are delivered within the 12 days of “December”, not “Christmas”. This suggests secularization, although Bednarczyk opens and ends with an instrumental version of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring, which at the end is beautifully transposed into Feste’s “When I was but a little tiny boy.”
It may be indecent to mention birthdays, but I do so only to salute the endurance, when sympathetically placed, of great acting. Oliver Ford Davies, 85, delights as Malvolio, whose cruel deception can lead to a poignant weapon of dementia, while Jane Asher and Clive Francis, both 78, are the quasi-feminist maid Maria and impeccably chaotic drunkard Sir Toby Belch respectively. Robert Mountford’s club-loving but befuddled Sir Andrew Agucheek would have appealed to safe Tory constituencies. As estranged twins Viola and Sebastian, Patricia Allison and professional debutant Tyler-Joe Richardson pull off an impressively believable gender switch. As in the National’s The Importance of Being Earnest, it is strongly suggested that amid confusion about who is masquerading as whom, no one will worry unduly about which gender they are sleeping with.
To adapt the opening lines, if this music game is a new Christmas classic, give me more of it.
