Twelfth Night *****

EXCERPT: “Rylance was quite exquisite: his mincing, tiny-step shuffling, high-pitched Olivia had all the vanity and selfishness Shakespeare wrote into her part, but was also imbued with a real emotional depth.”

All the hullabaloo about Twelfth Night, starring Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry, was totally spot on. Having transferred to the West End after an initial run at the Globe, the decision to have audience members being seated on extra wooden seating on stage – entirely visible and under the same light as the actors – shows the first attempt to try and replicate the Globe's relaxed atmosphere. Before the play starts, we see the actors being made up and dressed on stage. We see them easily interacting with one another, their attendants, and with the closest members of the audience. By abolishing the pre-performance quiet time actors have to themselves, the reverence with which modern day audiences view actors as Artists is replaced by a much more comfortable – and presumably more Shakespearean – actor-audience relationship. It becomes quickly apparent that this is director Tim Carroll’s aim: to re-create, as far as possible, the play as it would have been done in the Jacobean period.

With names such as Rylance (‘Britain’s greatest stage actor’ according to Time Out – and I wholeheartedly agree) and Fry gracing the stage, there is an easy comparison to make with the most famous Shakespearean actors, Richard Burbage and Will Kempe etc. Aesthetics are spot on with all-male casting, full Jacobean dress, make-up, set and scenery. Most impressive though is the fidelity with which they recreate the original comedic experience. There is something delightful in feeling we are being taken along the same journey as audiences were over 400 years ago. Although farce is not normally my sort of thing, Tim Carroll’s production derives a huge amount of humour from fully embracing the naturally farcical nature of Shakespeare’s script, its mistaken identities and many scatological and scurrilous jokes. The mix between high and low comedy is beautifully drawn out: word play is witty and intelligent in construction, but bawdy in tone. Other productions I’ve seen often employed explicit gestures to expose the words’ sexual undercurrents, but the talent of this cast meant they never had to so patronise their audience. Perhaps it is partly due to my familiarity with the script, but I felt that the ease with which the actors made meaning clear was notable. I was also pleasantly surprised by how much enjoyment I found in the rather obvious joke that a man plays a woman playing a man; the comedy this device alone provided far surpassed anything I’ve previously experienced during other all-male productions.

This gender-swapping tactic made two of the strongest performances – by Rylance as Olivia and Johnny Flynn as Viola/Cesario – all the more mesmerising. Rylance was quite exquisite: his mincing, tiny-step shuffling, high-pitched Olivia had all the vanity and selfishness Shakespeare wrote into her part, but was also imbued with a real emotional depth. Without losing our ability to laugh at her distress, we really felt and rooted for her. It was a simply sublime performance and watching him onstage felt like I was seeing history being made; I never wanted him/her to leave the stage. Johnny Flynn as Viola playing Cesario added a finely-tuned feminine charm to his every gesture and word, enabling him to be instantly distinguished from his twin brother Sebastian, even while the fullness of their identical makeup facilitated the mistaken identity joke. Other superb performances were given by Roger Lloyd-Pack as Aguecheek and Paul Chahidi as Maria; along with triple act Colin Hurley as Sir Toby Belch, they had me giggling constantly. Stephen Fry is the big name that's pulled in the crowds, but whilst he delivers a perfectly adequate performance as Malvolio and is pompously funny and tragic by turns, I felt he didn’t fully exploit the depths of the character’s brilliance or comedic potential.

What is perhaps most outstanding about the production is that, though Rylance’s superiority is inevitably recognisable, the rest of the cast are so uniformly strong that they can shine of their own accord and have us laughing throughout. I rarely stopped grinning – not just because of the comedy, but because it was just so great to see Twelfth Night so bloody well done.