Think of rock and roll
Shakespeare, and likely as not the commercial kitsch of Return To The
Forbidden Planet, based on a 1950s science-fiction film inspired by
The Tempest, will come to mind. When the energetic Filter company
decided to tackle Twelfth Night, however, a far more eclectic musical
mix came out in the stripped-down ninety-minute version of
Shakespeare's romantic comedy that visits the Citizens Theatre in
Glasgow next week.
Like The Tempest,
Twelfth Night opens with a ship-wreck. Unlike The Tempest, Twelfth
Night veers off into a madcap sequence of mistaken identity,
cross-dressing and thwarted love affairs before the inevitable happy
ending as Viola and Duke Orsino get hitched. Originally commissioned
by the Royal Shakespeare Company for its Complete Works Festival in
2006, Filter's thoroughly post-modern take on the play has proved to
be a sensation in Edinburgh, London, Holland, Germany and Spain,
hence this latest tour.
“It's the show that
never dies,” jokes Twelfth Night director Sean Holmes about the
production's longevity. “Which, considering how it came about I
think is pretty remarkable. We were at the curious end of the
Complete Works, alongside a lot of experimental companies playing in
a temporary space on the main stage that ended up being the
equivalent of a studio theatre. We had two weeks to do it, and we
decided we wanted to do something that was really stripped down, that
had the energy of a gig and was led by the music. After a few days we
realised we were still looking at it like a play, with different
lighting states and everything, so we stopped all that and decided
just to go for it.”
Filter's Twelfth Night
initially ran for three nights before becoming an Edinburgh Fringe
hit hat marked something of a turning point for Holmes as a director.
“At that point I'd
done quite a lot of work at the RSC,” he says, “and was
frustrated with myself at not being able to make what I actually
wanted to make. That was my fault, nobody else's. I had all these
massive resources available, but things never seemed to work out how
I wanted them to.
“I think Twelfth
Night was a response to that, to throw away all these barriers,
bounce all these ideas around and make something in two weeks flat
with this creative collective. Going back to it again now is really
interesting, because we never really had time to think about why we
were doing something, so at this point we can ask ourselves, well,
why did we actually do that?”
As Holmes intimates,
while the production stays faithful to the spirit of Shakespeare's
original, the music is the show's central component.
“The music is
integral,” Holmes says. “It's also more sophisticated than
anything we might think of as rock and roll Shakespeare. One song
will be experimental jazz, another will be thrash metal or folky, and
another will be this strange kind of trip hop reggae. Each one marks
the tone and atmosphere of a scene, and helps create this world with
just six actors. I suppose it's a bit like watching a radio
production in a way, in that it relies on the audience's imagination
to help conjure up this world.”
Holmes' attitude fits
in perfectly with Filter, who, since forming in 2003, have
endeavoured to break theatrical boundaries, both with new and
classical-based work. The fact that Filter has three artistic
directors – Oliver Dimsdale, Tim Phillips and Ferdy Roberts –
itself speaks volumes about the company's collaborative aesthetic.
While Phillips composes the shows musical scores, Dimsdale and
Roberts have performed in all of Filter's productions, ever since
their debut show, Faster, was described in these pages as 'a
blink-and-you'll-miss-it perfect fringe experience'.
Since the original
production of Twelfth Night, Holmes has become artistic director of
the Lyric Hammersmith, which in 2011 won an Olivier award for
'Outstanding achievement in an affiliate theatre' for Holmes'
production of Sarah Kane's iconic play, Blasted. The same year Holmes
made waves even further when he staged the first London production of
Edward Bond's equally iconoclastic play, Saved, in twenty-seven
years. With the Lyric currently in the throes of a major
redevelopment programme, rather than let the theatre to go dark, and
with various parts of the building not always accessible, over the
last year Holmes has instigated a season dubbed Secret Theatre.
For this off-kilter
venture, Holmes and Secret Theatre's resident dramatist, Simon
Stephens, whose fragmented post 7/7 play, Pornography, Holmes
directed at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, have put together a
company of ten actors alongside a mix of ten writers, designers and
directors to challenge assumptions of what theatre can be. Audiences
will book the eight shows by number rather than name, and may end up
seeing a deconstructed classic or else something brand new and
uncategorisable.
While such a
provocation follows on from a speech Holmes gave in June 2013 in
which he pointed out that, among other things, a lot of theatre was
boring, its roots can also be seen in Twelfth Night.
“The idea,” Holmes
says, “is to try and make a European style ensemble, but which also
has traditional British theatrical virtues. A lot of that sort of
thinking was influenced by doing Twelfth Night in the way that we did
it, and to leave everything wide open in terms of what theatre can
be.”
Holmes has collaborated
with Filter on another Shakespeare comedy in a production of A
Midsummer Night's Dream. When he and the company next work together,
in keeping with the philosophy of Secret Theatre, Holmes wants to
push things even further.
“We should probably
do a tragedy next,” he muses. “The Filter style lends itself to
the anarchy of the comedies, but now maybe Macbeth or King Lear is
the next summit to climb.”
Twelfth Night, Citizens
Theatre, Glasgow, January 28-February 1.
Filter – Ten Years of
breaking the rules.
Filter were formed in
2003 by actors Oliver Dimsdale and Ferdy Roberts and composer Tim
Phillips, and produced their debut show, Faster, the same year.
Other original works by
Filter include Silence, with the Lyric Hammersmith's then director
David Farr in 2007, and Water, again with Farr at the RSC.
Filter's production of
Twelfth Night first appeared in 2006 as part of the Royal Shakespeare
company's Complete Works festival.
As well as Twelfth
Night, Filter have collaborated with Sean Holmes on versions of other
classic plays, including Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle,
at the Lyric Hammersmith in 2010, Chekhov's Three Sisters, produced
in the same venue the same year, and Shakespeare's A Midsummer
Night's Dream.
The Herald, January 20th 2014
ends
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