“Sarah Greenwood’s Malvolio and Lucy Ross’ Maria were both delivered with a presence which drew the attention every time they were on stage…Shakespeare was way ahead of us in subverting the idea of gender as something permanently fixed. He his work is littered with twins, gender fluidity and love in its many forms..We left the theatre feeling that so much more coulda, woulda, shoulda happened” – Kate Stratford
Three holiday outings
Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is considered by many to be his best comedy. The title refers to the Christmas holiday where genders, servants and masters changed roles in an atmosphere of licensed disorder, led by a Lord of Misrule.  It is also known as the Feast of the Epiphany, which has nothing to do with the plot of the play yet captures its spirit perfectly. For in this feast of comic courtship, meta-theatre, confused longing and gender-fluid romance we conclude with many epiphanies. Plot wise, there is a central entanglement which revolves around a pair of seemingly identical twins of different sexes lost to each other in a shipwreck. But there are also comic side plots with bittersweet notes of grief and bullying; and it’s a testimony to Shakespeare’s masterful writing that all these elements are calibrated so beautifully. It is the kind of play that can seem as fresh the twelfth time you see it as the first.
Presented by Virginia Plain (an indy Sydney-based company), this production at New Theatre attempts to experiment with the play’s elements using twelve actors, each learning two roles and tossing a coin at the start of the performance to determine their parts. Such an approach should lead to a possible 64 casting combinations, so no two nights will ever be the same. Should. However, as each pair of actors tossed a coin, no-one called heads or tails. The actor tossing the coin simply called out the role they would play; the sense of fate hanging on the toss of a coin and the vision on which the production was predicated was lost. It was a missed opportunity to involve the audience, for each actor to react to their casting, to create a sense of chaotic fun which underpins the play.
A simplistic set of three white doors provided an ideal space in which to play out the antics of this comedy, but again, like the concept, was largely unrealised. So much possible humour, movement and physicality was lost through a lack of substantial door choreography. My companion of the evening, who had never seen Twelfth Night before, confessed to waiting for something highly comic to be done with the doors. They also confessed to not understanding much of what was said because of rushed lines and poor diction of some actors.
Costuming (Bronte Barnicoat) was another incomplete idea. Small companies struggle for funds, this is something we all know and accept but a cohesive idea can be fleshed out even with the smallest of budgets with begging, borrowing and op shops; and there are tricks to achieving a consistent look. Here we have a sense of actors raiding their own or their mum’s wardrobes for … whatever.
There were some evocative performances – Sarah Greenwood’s Malvolio and Lucy Ross’ Maria were both delivered with a presence which drew the attention every time they were on stage. These two, interestingly, are the production’s pairing of Maria / Malvolio and I would like to see how the play would feel when the roles were flipped. The ensemble was committed to the production but performances were uneven and at times, uncertain and undisciplined. Audience engagement wavered accordingly. The rich repartee between Olivia (Cameron Hutt) and Viola (Zac Bush), so full of references to playing and being in a play, was largely lost and it seemed this was not due to any lack of ability on the part of the actors, but to a lack of text exploration, a job of the director (Victor Kalka). All the stage skills in the world cannot cover a lack of engagement with text. This feeling of not working hand-in-hand with the text pervaded many scenes.
Shakespeare was way ahead of us in subverting the idea of gender as something permanently fixed. He his work is littered with twins, gender fluidity and love in its many forms. The plots and language (especially that of Twelfth Night) provide opportunities for enormous, captivating fun for audience and actors. We left the theatre feeling that so much more coulda, woulda, shoulda happened.
Kalka has taken this idea and run with it. One could wish he had run harder, longer and faster.
Kate Stratford, Theatre Now
