Skip to main content

Twelfth Night

Royal Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh
Four stars

It looks like the cast of Hair have fallen in with a bad crowd and ended up gate-crashing an acid-fuelled orgy in a crumbling Ladbroke Grove pile circa 1969 at the start of Wils Wilson’s hippy-dippy take on what is arguably Shakespeare’s most gender-bending rom-com. Serenaded back to life by a passing rock star played by composer Meilyr Jones, the high-as-kites in-crowd discover a dressing-up box and a dog-eared copy of the bard’s yarn to entertain themselves lest they’re dragged back into the real world.

Such is the audacious backdrop for Wilson’s tripped-out gender-fluid production, which runs riot on designer Ana Ines Jabares-Pita’s psychedelic play-pen of sexual revolution, soundtracked by Jones’ mix of Carnaby Street baroque and hippy trail exotica. Joanne Thomson’s Sebastian and Jade Ogugua’s Viola are anything but washed up as they fall in with assorted movers and shakers led by Colette Dalal Tchantcho’s flamboyant Orsino. Christopher Green’s Malvolio is a bowler-hatted love-sick toady who dotes on Lisa Dwyer Hogg’s Olivia enough to let everything hang out in kinky yellow lycra.

In terms of hi-jacking Malvolio, Joanna Holden’s Maria calls the shots alongside Dawn Sievewright’s sensibly-shoed Lady Tobi, a female version of Toby Belch. With Guy Hughes’ nice-but-dim Aguecheek in tow, on the face of it they are merry pranksters taking the rise out of the stuffy old-school establishment Malvolio represents. But there is subversion there too, with Maria and Tobi a double act with possible knowledge of Valerie Solanas’ rad-fem manifesto. Dylan Read’s Feste, meanwhile, is seriously on the make in other ways.

There is a strung-out ennui for those locked out of the love-in in this co-production between the Lyceum and Bristol Old Vic. For those turned on and tuned in, however, a groovy kind of love awaits.

The Herald, September 20th 2018


ends
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Losing Touch With My Mind - Psychedelia in Britain 1986-1990

DISC 1 1. THE STONE ROSES   -  Don’t Stop 2. SPACEMEN 3   -  Losing Touch With My Mind (Demo) 3. THE MODERN ART   -  Mind Train 4. 14 ICED BEARS   -  Mother Sleep 5. RED CHAIR FADEAWAY  -  Myra 6. BIFF BANG POW!   -  Five Minutes In The Life Of Greenwood Goulding 7. THE STAIRS  -  I Remember A Day 8. THE PRISONERS  -  In From The Cold 9. THE TELESCOPES   -  Everso 10. THE SEERS   -  Psych Out 11. MAGIC MUSHROOM BAND  -  You Can Be My L-S-D 12. THE HONEY SMUGGLERS  - Smokey Ice-Cream 13. THE MOONFLOWERS  -  We Dig Your Earth 14. THE SUGAR BATTLE   -  Colliding Minds 15. GOL GAPPAS   -  Albert Parker 16. PAUL ROLAND  -  In The Opium Den 17. THE THANES  -  Days Go Slowly By 18. THEE HYPNOTICS   -  Justice In Freedom (12" Version) ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Edinburgh Rocks – The Capital's Music Scene in the 1950s and Early 1960s

Edinburgh has always been a vintage city. Yet, for youngsters growing up in the shadow of World War Two as well as a pervading air of tight-lipped Calvinism, they were dreich times indeed. The founding of the Edinburgh International Festival in 1947 and the subsequent Fringe it spawned may have livened up the city for a couple of weeks in August as long as you were fans of theatre, opera and classical music, but the pubs still shut early, and on Sundays weren't open at all. But Edinburgh too has always had a flipside beyond such official channels, and, in a twitch-hipped expression of the sort of cultural duality Robert Louis Stevenson recognised in his novel, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, a vibrant dance-hall scene grew up across the city. Audiences flocked to emporiums such as the Cavendish in Tollcross, the Eldorado in Leith, The Plaza in Morningside and, most glamorous of all due to its revolving stage, the Palais in Fountainbridge. Here the likes of Joe Loss and Ted Heath broug...
2 comments
Read more

Carla Lane – The Liver Birds, Mersey Beat and Counter Cultural Performance Poetry

Last week's sad passing of TV sit-com writer Carla Lane aged 87 marks another nail in the coffin of what many regard as a golden era of TV comedy. It was an era rooted in overly-bright living room sets where everyday plays for today were acted out in front of a live audience in a way that happens differently today. If Lane had been starting out now, chances are that the middlebrow melancholy of Butterflies, in which over four series between 1978 and 1983, Wendy Craig's suburban housewife Ria flirted with the idea of committing adultery with successful businessman Leonard, would have been filmed without a laughter track and billed as a dramady. Lane's finest half-hour highlighted a confused, quietly desperate and utterly British response to the new freedoms afforded women over the previous decade as they trickled down the class system in the most genteel of ways. This may have been drawn from Lane's own not-quite free-spirited quest for adventure as she moved through h...
Post a Comment
Read more