Twelfth Night – Watermill | Peter Viney's Blog

Twelfth Night – Watermill

Twelfth Night
By William Shakespeare

Directed by Paul Hart
Designed by Katie Lias
Lighting designed by Tom White
Sound designed by David Gregory

The Watermill Theatre, Newbury

Saturday 22^nd April 2017, matinee

CAST:

Victoria Blunt- Maria
Peter Dukes – Malvolio
Aruhan Galieva – Olivia
Rebecca Lee – Viola
Emma McDonald – Antonia
Offue Okegbe – Feste
Lauryn Redding – Toby Belch
Jamie Satterthwaite – Orsino
Mike Slader- Aguecheek
Stuart Wilde – Sebastian

The Watermill Theatre

The Watermill Theatre is in an idyllic rural setting, yet close to the A34 trunk road and the M4 motorway. It’s an easy drive from large towns over a wide radius … it took us 75 minutes each way from Poole. It’s renowned for developing original productions, which then tour.

The second of the four major Twelfth Night productions in 2017 is sandwiched between the National Theatre and Globe versions. This one is set in a 1920s Jazz Club in the era of prohibition and the aftermath of World War One. A good addition was replacing the front row seats with cabaret seating at tables either side of the thrust stage, so that part of the audience became visual extras to create night club ambience..

Paul Hart says:

A jazz club seems the perfect setting for Twelfth Night given the play’s obsession with music, love and excess. Featuring live music performed by our multi-talented company, the soundtrack will be 1920’s influenced with a modern twist.

While both the National Theatre and Globe decided to make Malvolio female, this has a male Malvolio, but compensates by making Sir Toby Belch female, and Sebastian’s rescuer Antonio into Antonia, and female. Antonia gets referred to as both “sir” and “she.” Sir Toby Belch, I conclude is simply supposed to be male, but played by a female. Paul Hart, the director, worked with the all-male Propellor for years, so is totally at home with gender swapping.

The young cast is highly talented, and can only be described as actor-musicians. At least four of them get to play acoustic double bass, most notably where one fingers the fretboard while the other plucks the strings. Feste (Offue Okegbe) is an accomplished guitarist (note his instrumental version of Van Morrison’s Moondance) but all of them can sing and play instruments. Mike Slader as Andrew Aguecheek has fun with trombone. Lauryn Redding plays baritone sax and clarinet and sings Georgia Omn My Mind, up front at the start, as soft backing in part two. Aruhan Galieva as Olivia puts on a pork pie hat to play double bass with a bow. The final New Orleans Second Line jazz band all out production to Shakespeare’s words in The Wind and The Rain is sublime. Brilliant, and a massive change from the usual hey nonny no folkie version. Twelfth Night will be touring in repertory with Romeo & Juliet and the joint programme runs the actor’s names down the centre with Twelfth Night role on the left, Romeo & Juliet role on the right. Romeo & Juliet is revived from last year, so must be the starting point for the casting. If you’ve acted in a group, and played music in a group, you can see that the double roles aid a sense of “company” among the cast. It ran to two and a half hours, but felt shorter … it was cut to accommodate a lot of music. We’d had two full songs and a hilarious Orsino dance before we even got to If music be the food of love …

Twelfth-Night.-The-Watermill-Theatre.-Photo-credit-Scott-Rylander-006-640x427

Orsino (Jamie Satterthwaite) in the club

It is a radical interpretation. As with all concepts, bits work with the British speakeasy / night club (Olivia’s brother’s coffin is brought on, and is a large double bass case) but other bits just ignore it. I was surprised that Antonia’s arrest had Russian soldiers calling from the balcony, and that Orsino appeared dressed as an army captain (who should do his shirt and tie up more neatly). Neither idea worked in the night club, and a Mafia don with heavies … something of a cliche for modernised versions of Shakespeare dukes … would have fitted a night club better. The programme has much to say about 1920s music … though the director qualifies that with “1920s influenced” which is more accurate. They found (or maybe wrote) several marvellous songs which I’d never heard. Georgia on My Mind dates from 1930 and fits, and St James Infirmary aka Gambler’s Blues (played as instrumental backing) became popular in 1927, though the melody is 18th century. At the start of the second half, the instrumental versions of Moondance and Fever date from 1970 and 1956, but OK, they fit. In one instrumental backing … several speeches had music behind … I was amazed to hear what sounded like Steve Miller’s Love’s Fandango instrumentally, from his most obscure album, still unavailable on CD, Recall The Beginning. Maybe it just sounded like it, but if not it was a very esoteric choice. Malvolio’s final song in Act One was outstanding, both as a central vocal performance, but also with the full band backing and backing vocals.

Twelfth-Night-Watermill-Theatre

Malvolio’s song closes the first half

The outstanding role was Lauryn Redding as Sir Toby Belch. Forget whether she was male or female: she played it as the Ringmaster. The Master of Ceremonies. The link. This is a part that so often falls into dull “stage drunk” with dreadful lines, yet it was the choice role of the theatrical stars of the 1940s and 1950s. Lauryn Redding recaptures that with a relaxed take, heavy on audience interaction. Usually Sir Toby’s lines fall flat next to Sir Andrew Aguecheek, but here they both worked. Both Sir Andrew (Mike Slader) and Orsino (Jamie Satterthwaite) are tall and thin, which was visually interesting. A very funny Sir Andrew.

Twelfth-Night.-The-Watermill-Theatre.-Photo-credit-Scott-Rylander-008-768x512

Viola arrives (Rebecca Lee)

936

Cesario (Rebecca Lee) and Malvolio (Peter Dukes)

Rebecca Lee as Viola struck a perfect balance from girl to boyish … I remember the note from the National Theatre production that it makes more sense to list her as Cesario … it’s only at the end that we learn her name.

Twelfth-Night.-The-Watermill-Theatre.-Photo-credit-Scott-Rylander-027-640x427

Malvolio (Peter Dukes) reads the letter. L to R: Feste (Offue Okegbe), Malvolio, Andrew (Mike Slader), Toby (Lauryn Redding), Maria (Victoria Blunt).

It was exciting, fast, full of events. In the scene where Malvolio (Peter Dukes) reads the letter, the cast hid ostensibly behind the double bass, but then packed in tight behind him, froze, rolled off the stage, joined the audience. I loved their frustrated hisses of Malvolio! when Malvolio was struggling with the hidden word. Excellent choreography throughout.

Twelfth-Night.-The-Watermill-Theatre.-Photo-credit-Scott-Rylander-039-768x512

Antonia (Emma McDonald) and Toby Belch (Lauryn Redding)

Faults? It was hugely entertaining, but I found the last ten minutes of revelations jumbled, even if the great New Orleans jazz ending rounded it off in the best possible way.

Our Saturday matinee was, unbeknown to us, an integrated signing performance. This is neither a described signing performance (as at The Globe) or the video text elsewhere. The signers stood right next to the characters, centre stage, moved with them, and there were two signers. The characters interacted with them (most memorably when Cesario shared a cigarette with one), and leaned on the signers and directed lines at them. It must have been a whole other rehearsal level, and a huge amount of work by the signers. My companion took 15 minutes to get past it, while I took the whole 85 minute first half to accept it. I felt it interfered massively with blocking, I felt the actors were affected by someone signing … which is necessarily “bigger” … right next to them and mirroring them. My halftime conclusion was (a) the signing just about ruined the production that far (b) signing does not work for age related deafness as a video text does (older deaf people never learn sign language) and (c) the movement was to the detriment of the actors. I’d conclude that it was a very brave effort to integrate it with the play, the actors reached wonderfully to their signers

BUT it actually is a bad idea that requires a huge amount of work from signers and actors. Far better to have the one signer in a neutral position further back UNLESS it’s a performance specifically for the profoundly deaf since birth … in which case, a production where the strongest aspects were music is unsuitable anyway. Good try. As they tour the country, they should repeat the exercise, as for the deaf it will be the liveliest performance most will have seen. But I’d do a special performance in each town, advertise it widely among the deaf community within a 30 mile radius and go for party bookings. But I wouldn’t integrate it with a “normal” performance. I’d avoid it like the plague if I saw it was the special performance… which I didn’t. I agree I managed to see past it in the second half.I respected the massive effort put in by the highly-talented signers. But really the video text works better for a mixed audience. I thought overall it was such a good version, that I will try to see it again WITHOUT signing when it gets to Salisbury. It’s worth it.

OVERALL
***

(It would have been 4 star, but the signing took off at least one star for me, though not for my companion, usually a harsher judge than me, who gave it **** in spite of the signing.)

MUSIC CREDITS

The programme does not list the songs. It does say:

The music for these productions has been contributed and is played live by the company. It consists of existing material, original arrangements and compositions made in the rehearsal room. We are very grateful to the artists and other writers for allowing us to use their original music.

But not grateful enough to list them. A shame.

OTHER VERSIONS OF TWELFTH NIGHT ON THIS BLOG:

Twelfth Night RSC 2012
Twelfth Night – Apollo 2012 Mark Rylance (Olivia), Stephen Fry (Malvolio)
Twelfth Night- ETT 2014, Brighton Theatre Royal
Twelfth Night, National Theatre, 2017
Twelfth Night, Watermill, Newbury 2017
Twelfth Night, The Globe, 2017
Twelfth Night, RSC 2017
Twelfth Night, Young Vic, 2018
Twelfth Night, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2021

Peter Viney's Blog

ELT, theatre, music reviews