In 1937 the BBC broadcast a live excerpt of the play, the first known instance of a work of Shakespeare being performed on television, which featured a young Greer Garson. A 1939 television production of the entire play directed by Michel Saint-Denis starred Peggy Ashcroft as Viola and George Devine as Sir Toby. In 1970 John Dexter and John Sichel produced a version for television with Ralph Richardson as Sir Toby, Alec Guinness as Malvolio, and Tommy Steele as a youthful Feste, with Joan Plowright playing both Viola and Sebastian. Two years later Ron Wertheim's Playboy production was made: "As one might expect, the language of the play is ruthlessly cut to accommodate numerous and oddly innocent examples of Illyrian erotic revelry, rich in nudity, pastoral landscapes, soft-focus camerawork, and slow motion."39 The BBC's 1980 version is generally regarded as more successful, "graced with spirited performances by Felicity Kendall as Viola and Sinead Cusack as Olivia," with Alec McCowen as Malvolio and Robert Hardy as Sir Toby. It nevertheless "still suffered to some extent under the weight of canonical seriousness," and Ford notes: "There was a strange echo of the detailed, illusionistic settings of Beerbohm Tree."40
Trevor Nunn, who surprisingly had never directed the play on stage in his distinguished theatrical career, directed a successful film version in 1996. It was set in the nineteenth century and boasted a star-studded cast, with Imogen Stubbs as Viola, Helena Bonham-Carter as Olivia, Toby Stephens as Orsino, Mel Smith as Sir Toby, Richard E. Grant as Sir Andrew, Ben Kingsley as Feste, Imelda Staunton as Maria, and Nigel Hawthorne as Malvolio. The film opens by "inventing a kind of mock prologue that depicts the sinking of the ship and the rescue of Viola."41 Ford argues that "Nunn's emphasis on song and music ... allow his film to capture some of the aural energies of the play without compromising the film." Nunn successfully exploits filmic technique: "In one wonderful moment early in the film, Nunn uses the camera to capture the complex energies swirling within Viola. We see her in disguise, walking along the sea, determined to master her manly walk in a state of mind both resourceful and ironic."42
There were ironic references to Twelfth Night in John Madden's 1998 film Shakespeare in Love in which Gwyneth Paltrow played a young noblewoman called Viola who disguises herself as a boy in order to become an actor. In 2003 Tim Supple directed an updated version for television with Parminder Nagra as Viola, David Troughton as Sir Toby, Chiwetel Ejiofor as Orsino, and Michael Maloney as Malvolio. A Channel 4 documentary charted the course of production--21st Century Bard: The Making of Twelfth Night. In 2006 a contemporary teenage update called She's the Man, directed by Andy Fickman and starring Amanda Hynes, set the play in a prep school called Illyria.
AT THE RSC
Laughter in Illyria?
Twelfth Night is often referred to as Shakespeare's most melancholy or darkest comedy, and surely unrequited love and grief are not what you'd instantly think of as the basis for laughter. Nevertheless, the most painful of emotions are often the catalyst for the most beautiful of poetry. Writing about tragedy, Shelley believed, "The pleasure that is in sorrow is sweeter than the pleasure of pleasure itself."43 Shakespeare's genius in Twelfth Night is to take the pleasure that we feel from tragedy and successfully combine it with farce to create a hauntingly bittersweet comedy. The effect on the audience is to have them on the verge of tears or laughter at any given moment. In doing so he has created the most potent mixture of pleasures derived from the light and dark sides of literature.
The director of a production of Twelfth Night has to make decisions about whether his or her production will attempt to balance the elements of light and dark in the play, or to go to one extreme or the other. Productions by the RSC demonstrate a wide variety of approaches, and the difficulty in succeeding with this emotionally complex play is shown in its reviews. Directors have invariably been criticized for omitting comedy, neglecting depth of emotion, or failing to find a balance between the two.
From the 1960s onward a definite shift took place in which the darker elements became the central focus--aspects such as the treatment of madness, sexuality, and the character of Feste were radically reexamined, altering the tone of the play:
Twelfth Night is widely accepted as a supreme harmonizing of the romantic and the comic, sweet and the astringent. The admirable production, then, is held to be one which holds these elements in balance. It is in the inflection which a production gives to Twelfth Night that the special interest lies. And this inflection has undoubtedly modulated in recent years. Broadly, and crudely: Twelfth Night used to be funny, and is now much less so. What has happened?44
John Barton's 1969 staging is widely considered a landmark production because it was markedly different in tone from previous productions. His exploration of the psychological complexity of the characters created for one critic "the most austere Twelfth Night I have seen";45 for another it was suffused with "a kind of wintry melancholy."46 The program notes pointed to this darker reading:
For some characters [Orsino, Viola, Olivia, and Sebastian] ... holiday perpetuates itself ... The other characters of the comedy, by contrast, are exiled into reality. For most of them, holiday is paid for in ways that have real life consequences ... None of these characters can be absorbed into the harmony of the romantic plot. For the rest of us ... the play is done and we return to normality along with Sir Toby, Aguecheek and Malvolio ... we have been dismissed to a world beyond holiday, where "the rain it raineth every day."47
Barton's production effectively used the sound of the sea to bring in what Matthew Arnold in his great Victorian poem of loss, "Dover Beach," called "the eternal note of sadness":
The audience takes its seats to find Richard Pasco's Orsino listening to his musicians. Presently an aural disturbance comes upon the music. It grows louder, and is identified as the sound of the sea crashing upon the shore.48
Thus Orsino's longing for love is overlaid with the storm that heralds Viola's arrival, prompting, through the use of sound, the idea that she will awaken him from romantic delusion to reality and true love. The sound recurred during Viola's conversation with Orsino in Act 2 scene 4 and during her reunion with Sebastian.49
Viola acts as a catalyst, a storm of honest emotion: "throughout the play, the sea still tosses its waves: there are moments when the setting reminded me of the tunnel of a dream, a journeying place of the mind."50
Critic Robert Speaight experienced a sense of "the howling of the gale outside the gilded cage of Orsino's palace; reality at odds with romanticism."51 Even the comic characters were serious: "The knightly revels are sad too. Barrie Ingham's Sir Andrew is a knight of woeful countenance":52
Most startling and persuasive of the group is Elizabeth Spriggs, Maria: no longer the usual bundle of fun, but a prim Edinburgh housekeeper in gold rimmed spectacles, besotted with Sir Toby and only mounting the Malvolio intrigue with the purpose of luring him into marriage ... the essence of the reading appears after the carousel scene where she steals back hoping to catch Sir Toby alone, only to be packed off blubbering by the selfish old brute ("It is too late to go to bed") ... Malvolio: the agent of so much fear in the household, and finally the most wounded member of all--broken double under the weight of his humiliation, [stumbled] off stage after handing Olivia his chain of office. It is not a happy household.53
In John Caird's 1983 production inherent melancholy resulted from the pain of love. The program, instead of the usual notes, was littered with Shakespeare's sonnets on unrequited and barren love: "Set in the Jacobean period, the production accentuated a sense of decay and confinement by employing a ruined garden, rusting gates, and a mortuary chapel as components of the set design."54 Thunder rumbled in the background, only achieving downpour at the end of the play, cued by Feste's song. The impact of frustrated love and thoughts of mortality on Viola's psyche was demonstrated by an inspired bit of acting from Zoe Wanamaker:
the decisive moment in [her] performance as Viola came when reunited with Sebastian, she showed her deep fear that her drowned brother had returned a
s a ghost to frighten her. She had suffered enough already, and now, on top of everything, the spirit world was playing an unforgivable trick, trifling inexcusably with her deepest feelings of loss and grief.55
In recent years there has been a definite reaction against the "twentieth-century preoccupation with the play's melancholy."56 Ian Judge's 1994 production played "the broad comedy to the hilt."57 When discussing the play he observed that:
The beginning of Twelfth Night deals with bereavement: we see a girl hopelessly distressed, having lost her brother but then, because of hope and friendship she is able to reinvent herself: a disguise allows her to create a new life. That's comedy, not because it's funny, but because hope and joy can be seen to spring from happiness. Twelfth Night also shows the comedy of falling in love, which occurs when people turn themselves inside out and almost reach the edge of madness. There are a thousand different ways of laughing and I think that Twelfth Night touches them all.58
Taking a more extreme approach to the comic aspects, Adrian Noble's 1997 production had an exaggerated and comic nonrealist feel to the characters, setting, and costumes: "When there are gags to be gone for, Noble goes for them, adopting the anarchic visual humour of pantomime."59 The set, with brash, bold primary colors, was reminiscent of a child's play-box:
a pop-art playground complete with jokey lurid green carpet for the garden box-hedge. It's overhung by a day-glo blue arc, on top of which sits an orb that travels a day's length from west to east and sun to moon during the play's course.60
The design ... often seemed to take the 1950s (perhaps as perceived through Carry On films) as its historical cue ... the production was, in short, bold, brash and cartoon-like.61
Michael Billington referred to it as "a kind of pop-art Alice in Illyria with little emotional reality or erotic tension."62 Although entertaining, it annoyed critics with its gimmickries. Also, by playing up the comic aspects, Noble lost the poetry of the play. Dimension and depth were lost in the interpretation of the characters. The program notes reduced them to types found in an enneagram report,* and illustrated them with exaggerated and grotesque caricatures:
Twelfth Night is the darkest and most haunting of Shakespeare's great comedies, its humour constantly shadowed by cruelty and a keen awareness of mortality. Here, however the poetry is almost entirely missing and you are left with little more than crude, one-dimensional farce.63
Noble's production was a reaction against the type of Twelfth Night that had emerged since the 1960s, a conscious lampooning of the Chekhovian take on the play which began with John Barton's production in 1969. The effect of treating the characters as purely comic creations, however, was revealing in the failure of these productions to make you feel. It appears that the comedy, inherent in Shakespeare's text, comes from the characters themselves and is most effective when actors play the characters straight. Judi Dench, who played Viola in 1969, remarked: "John Barton was the one who said it's such a bittersweet play, that if you do that [i.e. play it purely for comedy] it tips over. It's not pure comedy."64 As academic and theater historian Ralph Berry explains,
a taste for dark comedy has long been prevalent ... the entire network of assumptions sustaining the old Twelfth Night has collapsed. And that raises the whole question of what is called, for want of a better word, comedy ... A modern production of Twelfth Night is obliged to redefine comedy, knowing always that its ultimate event is the destruction of a notably charmless bureaucrat.65
But, he goes on to ask, "Do we laugh at it?"
"Are All the People Mad?"
There is a great deal in Twelfth Night about madness ... for all its comedy and charm, [it is] very much darker than that. Like so many of Shakespeare's plays, it's about what happens to individuals when their idea of themselves prevents them from taking in the reality of the world around them. They act irrationally, lose their sense of proportion, become--in a way--unbalanced.66
Orsino is a victim of a type of madness to which the most admirable characters are sometimes subject. Its usual causes are boredom, lack of physical love, and excessive imagination, and the victim is unaware that he is in love with love rather than with a person.67
Orsino's complete lack of reason with regard to Olivia's refusal of him has been emphasized in more recent years. Michael Boyd's 2005 production had him in various states of disarray and undress, in a half-waking, half-sleeping state, indulging his every "romantic" whim, at the expense of his personal musicians, who had to get up and play music whenever he dictated. At one point they appear in dressing gowns, obviously dragged out of bed to perpetuate his obsessive sickness. Clearly unbalanced at the start of the play, his fantasy became so overwhelming that, in the final scene, he threatened to murder both Olivia and Viola. The question of whether or not he had regained his sanity remained ambiguous.
This emphasis on the madness of Orsino's wooing threw light on the fact that his behavior and romantic posturing is as forced as that of Malvolio. Faced with Viola/Cesario, who expresses her true feelings for Orsino through her entreaties, Olivia is awoken by a genuine note of true love. One of the play's ironies is that the man who is most sure of himself and most grounded in reality, Malvolio, is the one who is treated as insane.
In 1987 Bill Alexander wanted to emphasize the "madness" of all the characters, and his set and lighting plots played an integral part in this:
I wanted to stress in my production some of the links between love and madness ... to show people behaving in ways that are extreme, or deluded, or uncharacteristic--slightly "touched" perhaps ... I wanted a sense of the intense Mediterranean heat that can go to people's heads. So the stage set was rather like a Greek island--whitewashed houses, bright blue skies ... And the lighting was deliberately strong when people's behaviour was at its most illogical.68
The whitewashed walls of the set and the intense white lighting, specifically plotted for moments of "deranged" behavior, also encouraged a visual association with the white walls of a padded cell. This focus on madness was pursued to the end with a disturbing conclusion for Malvolio. Antony Sher, who played the part, "initially presented him as a figure of broad comedy, then showed the character degenerating through appalling suffering into real madness":69
[Malvolio] gives the impression of groping around in the darkness while his voice is amplified to suggest a hollow cellar ... [he] is tied to a stake like a bear and he whirls round it like some mad animal. At the end of the scene, he presses Olivia's crumpled letter against his cheek, with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face. This is an extremely powerful scene, which suggests, in a pathetic way, that the borderline between the light abuses of festive misrule and real madness has now become an extremely thin one.
When Malvolio reappears on stage at the end, he is totally bedraggled and, red-eyed, tries to shield his sight from the recovered daylight. But after Feste has once more taunted him with the whirligig of time speech, Malvolio says the expected "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you" in a curiously slow way that ends in a singsong. When he goes away, with a strange smile on his face, one understands that the joke has really been pushed too far and that he has become truly mad.70
Both this production and Michael Boyd's 2005 production made use of light inspired by the scenic device used in the play Black Comedy by Peter Shaffer, which takes place in the darkness:
instead of playing it in darkness, you actually put light on the stage. So what the audience sees are people behaving as though it were completely dark ... Instead of dimming the whole stage, we would flood a certain area of it with dazzlingly bright light to delineate the dark room. Both Feste and Malvolio would have their eyes open. But it would be clear to the audience from the very first moment--by the way that they moved around the stage--that neither of them was able to see a thing.71 [Michael Boyd] plays the dungeon scene in a blaze of light. Thus we don't strain to catch the sound of Malvolio's de profundis, but hear it and see it full-on as the rope-tethered Richard Cordery angrily prowls the stag
e like a captive wild animal.72
2. Bill Alexander production, 1987: Antony Sher as Malvolio, "tied to a stake like a bear ... presses Olivia's crumpled letter against his cheek with a tormented, hallucinated look on his face."
This being comedy rather than tragedy, the accusations of madness are usually uncovered before the characters are seriously injured, although we wonder just how far Maria and Sir Toby would have been willing to go in pursuing their "sport" to the upshot, without the self-serving interests that hold them back. Donald Sinden, who played Malvolio in 1969, believed that his degradation left him no option but suicide: "All his dignity has gone, everything he stood for has disintegrated, what is there left for him to do? Nothing ... I saw it as a very tragic ending ... Malvolio's a man without any sense of humor, and therefore, a tragic man."73
In Shakespeare's canon, the handling of Malvolio's torture is undoubtedly one of the most difficult scenes for a director to stage. The absurdity of the situation may have its own inherent humor, but it is a bitter and dark one, especially when we think of the usual Elizabethan treatment of the insane: in Romeo's words, "Shut up in prison, kept without food, whipped and tormented"; Rosalind, on the madness of love, mentions "a dark house and whip" as a cure. In Elizabethan times it was the general belief that mad people were mad because they were "possessed" by the devil or some evil spirit. An attempt was made by a priest or "conjuror" to exorcize the devil. If this failed, as it usually did, the poor unfortunate would be manacled and chained to the wall of a bare, dark cell, beaten or whipped to their senses. The cruelty of the prank on Malvolio can often elicit an uncomfortable response, and modern productions rarely let the audience off the hook. Do we laugh at it? That is a factor entirely dependent on the choices that the director makes.