Abstract
Olivia's brother never appears in Twelfth Night. But he is an important ‘ghost’ character, whose death (which has occurred before the play opens) has prompted his sister's mournful, protracted and, as far as Toby is concerned, self-indulgent grief: ‘What a plague means my niece to take the death of her brother thus?’ (1.3.1). At her first entrance, Anna Francolini's Olivia, carried the urn containing her brother's ashes and, to it, she sang ‘Fear no more the heat o'th’ sun’, a desolate lament about sibling mortality cut and pasted here from Cymbeline (4.2.259–82). The sequence established two principles that drove this beautifully balanced production of Twelfth Night: first, the imminence of expiry and second, the centrality of Olivia.
In the play, when Orsino asks who was singing last night, he is told it was Feste, ‘a fool that the lady Olivia's father took much delight in’ (2.4.11). Here, the script had been tweaked: ‘a fool that the lady Olivia's brother …’ The change was minute but its effect was to intensify the production's co-ordination of the fraternal and the valedictory – as though the crumbling aesthetic of the Olivia Nightclub (the production's setting) was attributable to Olivia's traumatic bereavement. As she pondered her own impetuosity in falling for Cesario, Olivia directly spoke to the urn on the table in front of her, confiding in her brother: ‘I do I know not what’ (1.5.298); he, the sequence seemed to suggest, would understand. Again, later, as though seeking her brother's advice or approval, she addressed the urn directly: ‘I have sent after him, he says he’ll come. / How shall I feast him? What bestow of him?’ (3.4.1–2). In the final sequence, the abandoned Olivia (Sebastian, having flirted with heterosexuality went back to his boyfriend, Antonio), sat at a table, the urn in front of her, her pose and expression reminiscent of the gloomy angel in Albrecht Dürer's engraving, Melancholia I. In spite of her big chanteuse numbers in outsized hats and spectacularly camp dresses, Olivia never really managed to get the nightclub firing on all cylinders. Perhaps she and her brother had shared the business and, with him gone, she could not quite face running it alone, as though her even being there was a constant reminder that he was not.
As the maître d’, Olivia oversaw a coastal nightclub peopled with sailor boys drawn from the final homoerotically bustling scene of Derek Jarman's film The Tempest. Large baggy culottes, bolero jackets over hooped vests and little camp sailor's caps comprised the uniform worn by the chorus who doubled as the club's resident musicians (sax, piano, double bass, and drums). Toby (Michael Matus) was an outrageous drag queen along the lines of Harris Glenn Milstead's Divine or Barry Humphries's Dame Edna Everage. But his was no cheeky pantomime dame; instead, he packed a vicious temper, snatching off his wig in fury and bawling ‘let her except, before excepted’ (1.3.6). Maria's attack (Anita Reynolds) on Toby's attire was rebutted with the fury of an anti-homophobic declaration: ‘I’ll confine myself no finer than I am’ (9). Squaring up to the killjoy steward over cakes and ale, Toby took a handful of icing and smeared it across Malvolio's face. Irascible and malevolent, this Toby was all the more brittle for being part of the decline of the nightclub itself: Olivia's self-pity was bad for business – end of!
Feste too, had seen better days. Julie Legrand was a Helen Mirren look-alike with a singing voice that approximated to the right note; it was a deft and dejected performance. As he (the production retained male pronouns), disguised as Sir Topas, oversaw the mad-cell scene, he asked his absurd questions in the manner of a TV quizmaster to a drumroll climaxing in a cymbal clash. Correct answers regarding Pythagoras drew a tinkle on the triangle while incorrect answers – the decision not to agree with Pythagoras on wildfowl – drew a double raspberry on the sax. At the production's closure, after everyone had exited, leaving the abandoned Olivia alone with her brother's urn, Feste was the first to return to her and join her at the table. Clearly, they went back a long way.
Into this out-and-proud setting, the repressed heterosexual, Malvolio, was completely out of his depth. Richard Cant's steward paused solicitously over his description of Cesario: ‘Not yet old enough for a man, nor young enough for a boy [pause – thinking of an apt analogy]; as a squash is before ’tis a peascod …’ (1.5.152). His pedantry was meticulous and unusually endearing.
The box-tree scene was unaccountably relocated: the text's ‘Get ye all three into the box-tree’ (2.5.14) became ‘… into the privy’. While Malvolio postured downstage, the observers hid, in plain sight, behind tiny potted plants or too slender columns. As he exited on ‘Jove and my stars be praised’ (166), the entire, hysterical company swelled onto the stage howling with laughter. Suddenly the door opened and Malvolio re-entered: ‘Here is yet a postscript…’ before going on to read the letter's request for him to smile. As he did so, all of the bystanders froze in unfeasible positions that they had to hold for the next 20 seconds or so. The fact that Malvolio didn't spot them was testament to his own self-absorption as well as the staging's tongue-in-cheek irony. His yellow stockings were a pair of yellow leather lederhosen with the cross gartering a sort of fetishistic strap-work across his naked torso – the kind of costume that belonged in this gay club but which was miles away from his more customary brown tweed two-piece suit: he was really sticking his neck out!
The achievement of this production was in its effective balancing of all this business with the pensive lyricism of the various wooing scenes. Evelyn Miller's Viola was beautifully lucid and her ‘I am all the daughter's of my father's house, / And all the brothers too’ (2.4.120–1) was paused just long enough to remind the viewer of Olivia's own fraternal loss. I’ve seen fifty Twelfth Nights and never caught this echo so effectively. As Viola imagined her own being in love her soaring cadences were almost songful: ‘Haloo your name to the reverberate hills, / And make the babbling gossip of the air / Cry out “Olivia!”’ (1.5.262–3).
There was none of the usual closeted embarrassment about the nature of Sebastian and Antonio's relationship (Andro Cowperthwaite and Nicholas Karimi). As the two of them arranged to meet at The Elephant, there was an unmistakable sexual surrender about Antonio's ‘There shall you have me’ (3.3.42) and in the final scene, Sebastian fell on Antonio with excited pleasure, ‘Antonio! O, my dear Antonio’ (5.1.215). Following the revelation of Olivia's mistaken marriage, Sebastian slyly reached for Antonio's hand, abandoning his new wife in favour of his old flame and the two of them withdrew leaving Olivia alone onstage. Surrounded by the tired and empty nightclub, its neon tube lights illuminated to the outside world but failing to draw in any clientele, Olivia moped with her brother's urn.
‘The wind and the rain’ was played over speakers but no one onstage was singing. Gradually, Olivia's closest thing to family – Feste, Maria, Toby, and Malvolio – gathered round her. Her life, love, and living all in ruins, a doomed ‘striv[ing]’ (5.1.404) seemed the only option left to her.