Royal Lyceum Theatre
Four stars
In appearance, at least, the whole thing resembles the sort of retro-styled cheese-fest designed for post-millennial loungecore clubs. Having one of just five performers play both Viola and Sebastian takes the cross-dressing to new heights in the romantic reconciliation scenes, where s/he gets to have his/her inter-gender flavoured cake and eat it, quite possibly with tongues. In delivery, however, a languid pace invests things with the exquisitely tragicomic melancholy of out of season vaudevillians playing to a half empty house.
Four stars
Life can initially appear terribly tame
in Dan Jemmett's end of the pier reimagining of Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night, performed in French with English surtitles by Jemmett's Eat A
Crocodile company. It opens on Illyria's hut-lined beach-front where
Viola has just been washed up without her missing presumed drowned
brother Sebastian. After an opening plea to the audience, she's soon
flattening her hair and donning vintage tweed to become Duke Orsino's
houseboy Cesario.
Wigs, hats, comedy glasses and joke
shop teeth are well to the fore in a show where Sir Toby Belch is a
tartan-suited comic turn who carries a ventriloquist's dummy version
of Aguecheek around in a suitcase. Orsino is a smoking-jacketed
crooner, who takes the play's 'If music be the food of love' speech
to new heights as he gets Feste to play a selection of charity shop
classics on a portable turntable in a way that more recalls Noel
Coward's line in Private Lives about the potency of cheap music.
Object of their affections Olivia is a big-haired fantasy starlet and
Malvolio a creepy Thunderbirds villain lookalike. A dispassionate
Feste, meanwhile, cracks bad gags in English with a deadpan delivery
that borders on loucheness.
In appearance, at least, the whole thing resembles the sort of retro-styled cheese-fest designed for post-millennial loungecore clubs. Having one of just five performers play both Viola and Sebastian takes the cross-dressing to new heights in the romantic reconciliation scenes, where s/he gets to have his/her inter-gender flavoured cake and eat it, quite possibly with tongues. In delivery, however, a languid pace invests things with the exquisitely tragicomic melancholy of out of season vaudevillians playing to a half empty house.
The Herald, August 12th 2016
ends
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