A Shadowed Enchantment

twelfth night
THe stratford festival
the National Post

Much like its new Romeo and Juliet, Stratford’s Twelfth Night comes with a frame, and in some ways a more logical one. “If music be the food of love play on” is the Duke Orsino’s famous opening line, and Martha Henry’s production gives him music plus words.

Brent Carver as Feste the jester is there to sing them, five scenes before his first scripted entrance, and he gives us a teaser of the “O mistress mine” that he will sing in full later on. Its bittersweet sentiments—“youth's a stuff will not endure”—hit the lovesick Orsino where he lives, and it makes more sense than usual that he shall call for a reprise, then peremptorily shut the performance down. Rather than the normal languid esthete, E. B. Smith’s Orsino is a real potentate, violent in his self-pity, capable of the murderous cruelty he threatens toward the end. The performance's execution lacks something in finesse, but the conception is an eye-opener.

Meanwhile, sending the clown in so early establishes him as the play’s chorus and commentator, which works, but also as its de facto central character, which doesn't. Carver acts and sings him hauntingly and with a touch of mischief; the singing being done to lovely new settings by Reza Jacobs that involve the magical touching of what are apparently called singing bowls. But the fact remains: Feste is an outsider to the action, with nothing much to win or lose from the development of the plot. Or plots. He lacks emotional heft.

 That ought to be supplied by the lovers, and especially by Viola, the shipwrecked woman disguised as a boy, wooing the countess Olivia on behalf of the Orsino whom she herself loves. Olivia then completes the pattern by falling for her. Viola both feels the pain of this and sees the humour, but apart from a few moments—notably her helplessly absurd cry of “I am the man”—Sarah Afful shortchanges both the ardour and the fun. In fact she’s outshone in both moods by Michael Blake, in the typically unrewarding role of her twin brother Sebastian. His bemused exuberance when Olivia outright proposes to him, having mistaken him for his sister, is one of the evening's highlights.

Olivia begins the play in ostentatious mourning for her own dead brother then snaps speedily out of it. Shannon Taylor gives us the outline of this transformation without much exploring it. It is, though, the mainspring of Henry’s production, reflected in both staging and setting. Olivia’s house and garden, as designed by John Pennoyer, get a summery makeover halfway through. There are times when the set seems cluttered but the triple tree that dominates it comes in very handy for an especially neat eavesdropping scene.

That gets us to the subplot, which is where this production's bittersweetness comes into its own. Rod Beattie’s steward Malvolio, the persecuted puritan, starts out hesitant but blossoms when he parades before his lady in the finery he doesn’t know she hates. At the end, when he vows revenge on those who have humiliated him, he casts a real chill; as has Geraint Wyn Davies as a Toby Belch fearful that his jokes have gone too far. Not that they haven't been good jokes while they lasted. This is the rare Sir Toby who is as funny as his dupe Sir Andrew; a feat considering that Andrew is Tom Rooney in full bloom and making the foolish knight more assertive than usual. Lucy Peacock (Maria) and Gordon S. Miller (Fabian) give excellent below-stairs support. The drinking scene is riotous, much helped by having two knights and a jester who can all really sing.

Stephen Russell's sea captain Antonio is good; uncomfortably positioned, though, for the last scene which he spends in custody. More important, the reunion of the twins, each of whom had thought the other dead, comes off half-hearted where it should be heart-stopping. But enough magic has accumulated through the evening for the ending to cast the right kind of shadowed enchantment. “But that’s all one” sings Feste, back in charge at the end, “our play is done.” And with the gender-mistakings having been sorted out, they all lived heterosexually ever after.