It is festival time in Illyria, with masked revelries alongside the music and song in Robin Belfield’s staging of Shakespeare’s comedy. A period-dress production with passing modern-day asides, it is extremely knockabout, steering away from the play’s anguished layers. That might be enough for a summer show, but it has little to add to Sean Holmes’s roisterous, post-pandemic romp of a Twelfth Night in 2021.
The dyspeptic crew comprising Sir Andrew Aguecheek (played by Ian Drysdale as a flouncy Oscar Wilde type), a Lady Belch (Jocelyn Jee Esien) and Maria (Alison Halstead) works well. But the angst around the central romances is swallowed up by laughter and lightness.
Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ is an upbeat Viola/Cesario, whose repressed passion for Orsino (Solomon Israel) is summarised in comic gurns. Orsino’s lovelorn self-indulgence is skimmed over and his vital speech “If music be the food of love, play on …” whizzes unnoticeably by. Laura Hanna’s Olivia is well played, but her character is sent up for the clownish nature of her mourning and too-quick switch to romantic desire for Cesario.
You do not feel the pangs of unrequited desire, and much of the verse is dampened by unremarkable delivery in general.
Belfield brings same-sex love to the fore by turning the devotion expressed by sea captain Antonio (Max Keeble) towards Viola’s twin brother, Sebastian (Kwami Odoom), into explicitly homosexual passion. That makes less sense when the latter marries Olivia. Does he swing both ways? It becomes another unresolved element in a baggy production whose japery spills into messiness, leaving some plot points opaque.
There are none of the sharper elements that give the play its complexities. Malvolio (lugubriously played with Quaker-ish beard by Pearce Quigley) is a puritanical killjoy but almost loveably crabby. He breaks up late-night revelries wearing a cute nightcap while clutching a teddy bear, and his gartered yellow stockings are not especially funny, although Quigley gives his persona a sexual energy after reading the trick letter. But his gulling never enters the realm of the tragic.
Jos Vantyler as Feste is a highlight with a beautiful singing voice and Simon Slater’s compositions are infectious with occasional “olés” added to Shakespeare’s songs. There are touches of the music hall in the movement, including the can-can in a funny scene involving audience participation.
Jean Chan’s set features a gigantic bronze sun beaming its rays across the stage, while her outfits give characters the look of garish peacocks or circus acts. So there is oodles of charm and midsummer madness ushering away the play’s darkness. Make of it what you will, I suppose.