Twelfth Night with a Nautical Twist

Twelfth Night
Soulpepper Theatre Company
The National Post

Soulpepper's Twelfth Night is a double first. It's their first attempt at Shakespeare, and -- since one doesn't want to see a prized classical troupe falling at the crucial fence -- it's a pleasure to report that the production is both lively and lived-in.

It's also the first show to feature the Soulpepper Young Company, a group of eight twentysomethings attached to, and partially trained by, the main body. They haven't been left entirely to their own devices; the idea here is that the young ones play the young ones -- which in Twelfth Night means the romantic leads -- and also do the walk-ons, while their elders handle the character parts -- which in this play means the comics. One can't help feeling that the grown- ups get the better deal. The play was to have been paired with Romeo and Juliet, a youth-opportunity project if ever there was one, but that production got cancelled following an accident to Romeo. This misfortune does leave Twelfth Night looking, stylistically and logistically, somewhat orphaned. Or rather -- like its heroine Viola after the shipwreck scene so graphically staged at the beginning -- it lacks a twin. You may be surprised to learn that Twelfth Night has a shipwreck scene. As written, it doesn't; the play begins with the vessel already sunk and the survivors arrived on shore. Undeterred, Albert Schultz, the director, has thrown in the entire opening scene of The Tempest. I must say this strikes me as excessive; the lines introduce us to characters we are never going to meet again, and if you really want to start things off with a storm, then a couple of rattles of the thunder-sheet and a few brisk bolts of lightning would probably do the job as well. The skipper, who sits serenely at the side of the stage while his boat goes down with all hands, is doubled with Feste, the jester, the presiding spirit of Twelfth Night itself; and there seems to be an idea that the whole thing is his dream.

The show doesn't have much of a set, but there is rigging that can seem suggestively nautical, and a curtain that in certain lights is very much like a sail. Periodically throughout the evening we hear the sound of the sea. Before delivering the play's official first lines (which we do eventually get to) Duke Orsino is discovered peering fixedly through a telescope, and a later scene finds him apparently taking a dip in the ocean -- or, since the play is set in Illyria, the Adriatic.

The production as a whole shares his marine fixation but, though there is plenty of warrant for it in the text, the staging cannot make it stick. The trouble with concepts is that you need external effects to reinforce them; and this production, obviously done on a shoestring, looks ostentatiously economical. Furniture consists of a few tables and rostra, endlessly shuffled about. (Romeo was presumably to be done the same way, on the justified assumption that one production makes a convention, two make a style.) The evocativeness of this arrangement depends largely on the acting going on inside it. The below-stairs scenes leave little to be desired. When it comes to the grand reconciliation at the end, all concerned bust a gut to achieve epiphany, but it eludes them. Concepts, to put it mildly, are not everything. This is still a good production, full of inventive and sometimes hilarious detail, and shrewdly alert to the dynamics between characters, though necessarily uneven in realizing them. There are actually three levels of experience in the cast. There are the youngers, the regulars and John Neville, who came to Canada from Britain some 30 years ago and was a classical doyen even then. He now perches with engaging ease at the top of the pyramid, playing Feste, whom he projects as an old Cockney music-hall comedian with a capacious hat and a sense of professional and personal disillusion that has long since gone through bitterness and come out the other side. He bristles, discreetly but noticeably, when anyone patronizes him, and enjoys affecting a Welsh accent to impersonate a parson. He also, of course, plays the Sea Captain: a one-scene role to which has probably never been afforded such weight in the preceding 400 years. If I may wax nostalgic over a slightly shorter period: Neville was in the first Twelfth Night I ever saw, in London, playing a delicate Sir Andrew Aguecheek that I have never seen equalled. I haven't, though, seen anyone get closer than Steven Sutcliffe, whose Andrew is an enchanting gull, infinitely suggestible, easily deflated, and prone to foredoomed bouts of foot-stamping assertiveness. The relationship between him and Randy Hughson's alcoholically exploitative Toby Belch is the best thing in the evening, and it is further enhanced by Maria Vacratsis's scheming Maria, superbly self-assured. The deluded Malvolio is Oliver Dennis, who manages a fine and very funny balance between the pompous and the pitiable: a Soulpepper regular who has never before had a part so good or played one so well. Michael Hanrahan, himself a good Malvolio two years ago, is now a first-rate Antonio.

The best of the showcased juniors is Kristin Booth's Olivia, vivaciously clutching at any excuse to escape from her self-imposed mourning; you can see it, even before she falls in love, in the self- conscious giggle she emits from behind her veil when the clown makes one of his better jokes. Richard Clarkin gets Orsino's love-struck narcissism full-strength, but he doesn't have the authority demanded even of Shakespeare's most dubious dukes, and he pushes his way heavily through the verse. So, much of the time, does Patricia Fagan whose Viola suggests interesting ideas that are still at the planning stage. She does, though, have an enchanting moment when, disguised as a man, she's manoeuvred into a duel with the equally terrified Andrew: she's stiff as a board, he's wobbly as jelly. Part of the greatness of the play is the fearlessly fluid manner in which its worlds overlap and intersect; one of the best things about Schultz's staging is its constant awareness of this. This is his directorial debut for the company he founded and heads, which makes it, to amend my opening, a triple first.