Copping Flack: Belvoir’s Twelfth Night

Shakespeare’s festive comedies – A Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Twelfth Night – are bound within a series of strict societal rules, rules which govern behaviours, moods, actions and reactions, as well as language and plot. They also perform a very specific function, namely allowing the society’s capacity for anarchy or misrule to find a full expression in an environment where mischief-making can be corrected, apologised for, and in some cases, released. Punning on the notion of ‘will’ – the idea of desire and love (and/or lust), as much as autonomy, as well as being a euphemism for penis – Shakespeare somehow manages to create a play which, like Rosalind at the end of As You Like It, asks us to cherish what pleases us and forgive the rest.

Eamon Flack’s As You Like It, seen at Belvoir in 2011, took Shakespeare’s play and infused it with a wit, warmth, and fullness of life and expression that barely seemed to be contained within the two walls of the Belvoir stage, and later spilled over into the street outside. In creating that production, Flack and his collaborators “gave [themselves] the same task Shakespeare gave himself and his company” – that is, to (re)create the kind of experience that Shakespeare might have written to be performed on Shrove Tuesday at Richmond Palace in 1599, in the presence of Queen Elizabeth I. In that instance, As You Like It became “a show about a bunch of city people visiting a pastoral realm of bucolic contemplation, performed for a bunch of city people visiting a pastoral realm of bucolic contemplation,” that is to say the theatre. I mention all this in prologue to ground Flack’s latest production of Shakespeare’s last great festive comedy – Twelfth Night, or What you will – also perhaps Shakespeare’s darkest, within a kind of self-critical feedback mirror.

In his director’s notes for Twelfth Night, Flack writes about the holy days and feast days when controlled anarchy (such as pageants and rough-theatre) was permitted. He also says that for Twelfth Night, he and his collaborators set themselves the task of “performing the play almost entirely as written[,] partly as a boast and partly as a warning, because some of the play is now archaic nonsense… [We] have taken the play on its own terms and plunged headlong into its strange poetry because the archaic oddity of the play is what makes it glorious.” Except that it’s not. Not really. Not much at all.

Play-fullness: An Australian approach to the classics

This article was first published on NITEnews’ Spotlight website in September 2014. 

In 2010, the Bell Shakespeare Company toured Shakespeare’s mercurial comedy Twelfth Night around Australia. Directed by Lee Lewis, the production was grounded in the context of the Black Saturday bushfires of February 2009; the actors emerged out of the blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other a story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Using costumes drawn from a large pile of clothes donated to charity set in the centre of the stage and a scattering of cardboard boxes around its edges, Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple answers to switching identities at the drop of a hat, and made sure that joy and an effervescent sense of life were never far away from the very tangible sorrow, melancholy and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean comedy. I mention this production for two reasons: first, it was the first time that I saw a production of Shakespeare and understood – felt – the story and the very real humanness at its heart; and second, because Lewis’ Twelfth Night felt like a fresh new play, a play written now, for a contemporary audience.

What you will: Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night

Back in 2010, Bell Shakespeare’s national tour of Twelfth Night was a revelation for me. Set in the aftermath of the (then) recent Victorian bushfires, the characters emerged out of the blackness, exhausted and covered in soot, and proceeded to tell each other (and us) a story, assuming the identities and roles of the characters in Shakespeare’s play. Set around a giant pile of clothes and cardboard boxes – a refuge centre, we assumed – director Lee Lewis delighted in the playful theatricality of disguise, the simple ingenuity of switching identities at the drop of a hat, and the joy and aliveness that is never far away from the very tangible sorrow and heartbreak that sits at the core of all Shakespearean tragedy. Ending with a beautifully effervescent dance to ‘Walking on Sunshine,’ it was hard not to be moved by the panache, verve and relish in theatrical delight with which the production revelled. But then I saw Sport for Jove’s Twelfth Night and, well, I think the two are in their own ways masterpieces of their craft.

Written in 1601, Twelfth Night draws from the deep well-spring of many of Shakespeare’s comedies – twins (or siblings) separated by a disaster and then brought together by a twist of fate – and spins it into a heady tale of reflections and refractions, mirrors and echoes, love given and unsought, lost and found. The very idea of doubles or mirrors ripples through the fabric of Shakespeare’s plot and language and characters, and it’s a curiously contemporary examination into the old adage (from the very quotable Hamlet, no less) that “the clothes maketh the man.”