{"id":1479,"date":"2017-11-10T16:11:26","date_gmt":"2017-11-10T16:11:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/?p=1479"},"modified":"2017-11-10T16:11:26","modified_gmt":"2017-11-10T16:11:26","slug":"not-quite-what-you-will-but-almost","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2017\/11\/not-quite-what-you-will-but-almost.html","title":{"rendered":"Not Quite What You Will, but Almost"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cWhat country, friends, is this?\u201d\u00a0 You might well ask.<\/p>\n

In the Royal Shakespeare Company\u2019s new production of Twelfth Night<\/em> the opening line is delivered by Viola\/Cesario, played by Dinita Gohill, in gorgeous Indian get-up, and when we glimpse Esh Alladi as her twin, Sebastian, and Beruce Khan as a turban-topped Feste, you wonder whether director Christopher Luscombe has set Shakespeare\u2019s melancholy comedy in Wembley, next door to \u201cThe Kumars at Number 42.\u201d (This award-winning, always hilarious British TV sit-com about an Indian family in London ran to seven series, though it never made it to the US.) Simon Higlett\u2019s sets, though, are clearly late Victorian, so you begin to suspect that the relationship of Olivia (played with extraordinary serenity and poise by Kara Tointon) and Viola echoes that of the old queen Victoria and the Munshi, Abdul Karim. Indeed, in the programme, Feste is billed as Olivia\u2019s \u201cmunshi.\u201d ( I have to confess that I sometimes found his sing-song, pretend babu accent hard to decipher, my sole complaint on this score, except when some of the characters on the thrust stage spoke with their backs to me).<\/p>\n

But then, the \u201ccreative team\u201d has divided the play between the Town and the Country, mediated with extreme cleverness by railway stations. The first Town scene shows not the court of Duke Orsino, but his studio, where the \u201cpainter\u201d (Nicholas Bishop) is working on a nearly nude likeness of his \u201cmuse,\u201d Curio, while his \u201cfriend,\u201d Valentine, tinkles on the keys of a piano.\u00a0 We think we\u2019re now in Merchant-Ivory territory, but with explicit \u2013 indeed panting, erect nipple \u2013 homoeroticism.<\/p>\n

Still later, when we meet the Country folk, a Belch who farts (John Hodgkinson, who is also capable of showing Sir Toby\u2019s fangs) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek, clad in almost equally antisocial yellow argyle stockings (a superb performance by Michael Cochrane, whom I\u2019m thrilled to see in the flesh, as he is Oliver Sterling of The Archers<\/em>, the daily BBC Radio 4 drama to which my household is addicted), we have to wonder if we have perhaps strayed into the realm of the Victorian\/Edwardian music hall. The housekeeper, Maria, who invents the plot and forges the letter that ruins Malvolio, is played with a vigorously Welsh accent by Vivien Parry. And the steward himself, with spectacular yellow stockings and cross-garters, is the magnificent Adrian Edmondson, who shows exactly how horrid the wrath of an ur-Puritan can be. (Norman Maclean, who taught me Shakespeare, maintained that Shakespeare\u2019s politico-religious sympathies could be detected in the hammering he gives Malvolio.)<\/p>\n

In the last act Antonio (Giles Taylor), Sebastian\u2019s would-be lover, sports a green carnation, and it finally dawns on us that what we\u2019re seeing is neither the TV Twelfth Night<\/em>, nor the Merchant-Ivory, nor the music hall version, but the Gilbert & Sullivan makeover. It\u2019s Patience<\/em>, and suddenly everything seems greenery-yallery, Oscar Wilde\/Walter Pater, D\u2019Oyly Carte aesthetically camp \u2013 and we understand the wonderful letter scene in the garden with the over-endowed ruined statues, and the nipple-pinching pantomime of it all. \u201cPlease One and Please All\u201d becomes a patter-song and \u201cWhen that I was and a little tiny boy,\/\u00a0\u00a0With hey, ho, the wind and the rain,\/A foolish thing was but a toy,\u00a0\/\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0For the rain it raineth every day\u201d\u00a0is repeated as a fetching music hall number for the finale. It\u2019s a glorious show, damned near superior pantomime (as, one could argue, it was for Shakespeare himself). It\u2019s perfect Christmas fare, and, as it is on the sexy side, will do wonders for those who see it \u201clive\u201d in cinemas all over the world on Valentine\u2019s Day, Wednesday 14 February. Even in this energetic romp of a production, Twelfth Night<\/em> retains its edge and bite. The only thing missing is its quiet melancholy \u2013 which we don\u2019t really need, as we have contemporary politics to supply plenty of that.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat country, friends, is this?\u201d\u00a0 You might well ask. In the Royal Shakespeare Company\u2019s new production of Twelfth Night the opening line is delivered by Viola\/Cesario, played by Dinita Gohill, in gorgeous Indian get-up, and when we glimpse Esh Alladi as her twin, Sebastian, and Beruce Khan as a turban-topped Feste, you wonder whether director […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[35,36,1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1479","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-blogroll-2","7":"category-elsewhere","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"entry","10":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-nR","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1479"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1482,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1479\/revisions\/1482"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1479"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1479"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1479"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}