The final performance of this much-praised production on Saturday night brought me a moment of deja vu. Let me explain. A couple of minutes into the play, on came Sir Andrew Aguecheek, played by the spider-legged Guy Henry. But it wasn't the long legs that provided the Proustian madeleine; it was his blond wig. Where had I seen it before? I wondered. I wasn't exactly bored by the opening scene between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew, but I had heard these 400-year-old jokes quite a few times before, so I allowed my attention to wander a little. That wig -- it seemed strangely familiar. I should explain that I was sitting in the front row of the grand circle of Wyndham's theatre looking down. It was the angle of view that helped to unlock my memory bank. A decade ago I spent an entertaining two years as a Westminster lobby correspondent, peering downwards at the same angle from the Commons press gallery at the performers in the Palace of Varieties beneath me. Michael Fabricant is a Conservative MP whose extraordinary blond thatch has become famous over the past ten years thanks to repeated descriptions in Simon Hoggart's parliamentary sketches for the Guardian. The realisation that Guy Henry was wearing Michael Fabricant's blond hair, presumably for the entire duration of this play's run, struck me like a thunderbolt. Had he hired it? Borrowed it? Or found it in the back of a taxi? More importantly, how was the original owner coping without it? If Mr Fabricant had been occupying his seat in the Commons without his blond topping, its disappearance would immediately have been flagged up by Simon, who over the years has shown an obsessive interest in the subject. I was forced to conclude that the original hair must have been replaced by an understudy, as David Tennant was last December when his back gave out halfway through his run as Hamlet. Had anyone else noticed? Because life at the Commons tends to happen in the evenings, Westminster
parliamentary folk rarely if ever go to the theatre. I concluded it was likely that nobody else with experience in the Commons press gallery had been to Wyndham’s theatre and made the vital connection.
Having transported my mind back to the Commons, I immediately started to see other resemblances. Ron Cook’s Sir Toby Belch was no jolly Falstaffian quaffer, but a seedy alcoholic with a hip-flask in his pocket; I have never seen a serial boozer portrayed so well on stage. I was back in the Commons press gallery bar, among whose regular customers Cook’s Sir Toby would have passed unnoticed. I then imagined Indira Varma (Olivia) as an elegant but flirty Tory lady, Samantha Spiro (Maria) as a waitress in one of the Commons restaurants, and Victoria Hamilton (Viola) as an earnest young Labour researcher, possibly confused about her sexuality. But the crowning moment came when Derek Jacobi (Malvolio) tried to wrench his features into an unaccustomed smile at the end of the letter scene. First he wrenched his jaw one way, then the other, then he opened his mouth wide, then he closed it again, and finally with a supreme effort, contorted his face into a vacuous and lop-sided grin. As I joined in the applause, two words came into my mind: Gordon Brown. If ever there were a politician who ought to appear in yellow stockings and cross-gartered, it's our prime minister.
This production wasn’t the best or the funniest Twelfth Night I have been to, but I’ve been lucky to have seen three superb versions in the last few years. I have great memories of an all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe with Michael Brown as a very touching Viola and Mark Rylance as a hilariously funny Olivia. In the same year Sam Mendes signed off his decade at the Donmar with a wonderful production featuring a hairnetted Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio and Helen McCrory as Olivia. More recently I greatly admired Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl Russian version at the Barbican, which turned the play into the tragedy of Malvolio. Last night at Wyndham’s I thought Jacobi, while giving a splendid turn as the pompous steward (a ringer for those penguin-suited ushers who carry messages to MPs at Westminster ), fell a little short of Russell Beale. I felt I was watching three separate characters – a pompous ramrod-straight Malvolio in the opening scenes, a pantomime clown in the comedy scenes, and a wreck of a man in the final scenes. Only on Malvolio’s final exit, when he shouts ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ did the character morph back into his earlier incarnation.
Watching Victoria Hamilton as Viola was a sheer joy. She’s an actress I have long admired, since I saw her in several plays at the Old Vic by Peter Hall’s company in the 1990s. I remember her wonderful performance as Rosalind in As You Like It in 2000, a Sheffield Crucible production directed by Michael Grandage. No surprise that he picked her again for Viola, and no matter that she comes barely up to Guy Henry’s waist; she’s an actress of rare intelligence, warmth and comic skill who’s not afraid to rethink familiar lines and make them sound fresh and interesting. I particularly enjoyed her reinterpretation of the opening scene with Olivia (‘Make me a willow cabin at your gate…’) in which she conveyed a real mixture of conflicting emotions. This scene was for me the highlight of the evening. By contrast, some of the comic scenes, notably the duel between Viola and Aguecheek, were treated rather perfunctorily. Call me a pedantic realist if you like, but I’m always a little irritated by Shakespearean productions in which the designer deliberately muddles up times and places. Here we had Viola rescued from the sea in a flowing Victorian dress, Orsino wearing cotton pyjamas, his flunkeys in vaguely Indian waistcoats, Olivia in 1930s Riviera beachwear, Feste in a coloured patchwork dressing gown and Malvolio in a jaunty yachting cap, blazer and white shorts. Somehow it didn’t quite hang together as it should have done. Despite these minor criticisms, it was a great evening of Shakespeare.
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