This is a boisterous performance, and, aside from my reservations about Rylance, is delightful and effective. While I found Johnny Flynn unconvincing as Viola, I thought Colin Hurley, as Sir Toby Belch, and Roger Lloyd Pack, as Sir Andrew Aguecheck were a wonderful comic duo. The rest of the cast is very good, if not excellent. The scene in the garden where Malvolio reads the forged letter from Olivia – really written by Maria – is a masterpiece, as Fry falls into the character with ease and grace.
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Steven Fry (Malvolio) and Mark Rylance (Olivia).Īs for Malvolio, Steven Fry gives a powerful performance of this somewhat gauche man who is full of himself, then thinks himself loved by Olivia. The look on Olivia’s face when he suggests that Malvolio – clearly a trifle mad – go to bed, and the latter replies, “To bed! ay, sweet-heart, and I’ll come to thee,” is memorable. Certain gestures, glances, and stuttering words give the character a life that no soliloquy could equal. Nevertheless, there are certain points in the play when Rylance’s Olivia achieves perfection. While his acting is nearly perfect from a textbook point of view, I just didn’t find his characterization believable enough. The voice he uses – a slight falsetto – makes him sound like an elderly woman. Olivia should be fairly young, yet Rylance is in his 50s. Rylance plays a role that is subtle and powerful, yet I had a bit of difficulty suspending belief. The performance revolves around Mark Rylance’s Olivia, who has a strong stage presence throughout. The Globe’s approach to have almost no sets – other than the occasional table or bench – makes the stage very fluid, and the actors all bubble with humor throughout. This is a lively production, with wonderful comic timing, with entrances and exits making scenes segue with no interruption. But all ends well, as the two loving couples unite. In the end, Viola’s brother Sebastian returns, and there is confusion with Olivia who marries Sebastian, Viola’s twin brother, then sees Viola who knows nothing of the marriage. Maria, Olivia’s maid, together with two comic characters, Sir Toby Belch (a Falstaff-like character) and Sir Andrew, are involved in a ploy to trick Malvolio and make him think he is loved.
A side plot involves Malvolio, who has the beguine for Olivia. The rest of the play revolves around the confusion that arises when Viola falls in love with Orsino, and when, as courier to Olivia sending messages of Orsino’s love for the latter, Olivia becomes smitten with Viola. She hear’s of Orsino’s love for Olivia, and realizes that, if she were disguised as a man, she might serve as matchmaker, and “might not be delivered to the world.” The play begins with Viola’s explanation for why she dresses as a man. Johnny Flynn plays Viola (also known as Cesario, creating yet another layer of dissimulation), Mark Rylance is Olivia, and Paul Chahidi plays Maria, Olivia’s maid. In this production – described as an Original Practices performance – the Globe Theatre company performs Twelfth Night with all men, bringing back the way gender was treated in the early 17th century. The Elizabethan stage did not allow women on stage, so any time there was cross-dressing, it created double ambiguity: a man playing a woman dressed as a man the audience certainly understood that two-pronged change. And the woman dressing as a man was essential in As You Like It, which Shakespeare wrote just a year or two earlier, where Rosalind had to hide her femininity during her travels in the Forest of Arden. In that play, the twins were separated at birth. The idea of separated twins is something Shakespeare used in the early Comedy of Errors. But between the separation and reunion, much happens, all having to do with wooing and love.
One, a woman, dresses as a man, and the two are reunited at the end of the play. A pair of twins is separated in a shipwreck. Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, or What You Will, which dates from the fecund year of 1601, just after Hamlet, is one of the bard’s plays about confusion.
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