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.”
