Stage Dragon Review: Twelfth Night – Yvonne Arnaud Theatre’s Mill Studio

Published on: 3 Sep, 2018
Updated on: 3 Sep, 2018

The Oxford Player’s production of Twelfth Night is set in the 1960s.

By Laura Neuhaus

The Oxford Shakespeare Players delivered on Wednesday (August 29, 2018) a bold and boisterous performance of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the Mill Studio.

The audience watched as the well-known characters entered the stage in 60s dress, with platform boots, bright shirts, bandanas, and loud 60s-style music composed by Joseph Currie, ready to perform the plot of identity intrigue, gender fluidity and plenty of foolery.

Shakespeare wrote the play towards the middle of his career and the title “Twelfth Night” references the twelfth night of Christmas celebrations known for turning everything upside-down, just as this cast of 13 created entertaining chaos in the Mill Studio.

The play was one of big personalities – especially the pouting Orsino played by Marcus Knight-Adams, and the drunkard Sir Toby Belch played by Joe Peden. Jonny Wiles as Malvolio showed how the only upright and strict character quickly begins to unravel. He took the audience in with his intense daydreaming, only to shock us with his yellow and cross-gartered legs as he tries to seduce Olivia.

The director, Fred Wienand, decided to give the many laughs a melancholic edge by intensifying some of the darker moments in the play. Especially the fool Feste, with her slow and soft love songs, brought the high-paced foolery to moments of stillness.

The nightclub and fashion house settings served for laughter too, when characters spent scenes hiding behind the mannequins and cardboard cut-outs. The lighting and music were used effectively to bring about sudden changes of mood – from the soft darkness that shields the night time foolery to the offensive brightness brought on by Malvolio’s entrance.

The actors delivered some of Shakespeare’s best-known lines – “the whirligig of time” and the “some are born great, some achieve greatness” – with a feeling for their poetry so that Shakespeare’s presence was felt through the updated modern setting.

The play of excesses, indulgences and extremes, questions where to draw the line and at which point harmless fun turns into something damaging and darker. The Oxford Players definitively left us “with problems, rather than solutions” as the director intends.

As a text-conscious, creative and fun production of one of Shakespeare’s most popular comedies, the Oxford Player’s Performance is only to be recommended.