Twelfth Night (24 page)

Illyria is a land which encompasses all the worlds that Shakespeare inhabits: “How curious a land is this—how full of untold story, of
tragedy and laughter
, and the rich legacy of human life; shadowed with a tragic past, and big with future promise!”
⁹⁸

Sam Mendes
was born in 1965 and began directing classic drama both for the RSC and on the West End stage soon after his graduation from Cambridge University. In the 1990s, he was artistic director of the intimate Donmar Warehouse in London. His first movie,
American Beauty
(1999), won Oscars for both Best Picture and Best Director. His 1998 Donmar production of
Twelfth Night
(staged in repertoire with Chekhov’s
Uncle Vanya
as his valedictory shows as the theater’s artistic director), which he talks about here, featured Emily Watson as Viola, Helen McCrory as Olivia, and Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio.

Declan Donnellan
is joint founder and artistic director of the highly successful theater company Cheek by Jowl, with the designer Nick Ormerod, his partner. Born in England of Irish parents in 1953, he grew up in London and read English and law at Cambridge University. He was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1978. For Cheek by Jowl he has directed many Shakespeare plays, including a hugely acclaimed all-male
As You Like It
. He has also directed for the RSC
and the National Theatre, and has worked extensively in Russia, including a
Winter’s Tale
for the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg. In 2000 he formed a company of actors in Moscow, under the auspices of the Chekhov Festival, whose productions include Pushkin’s
Boris Godunov
, Chekhov’s
Three Sisters
, and the
Twelfth Night
that he talks about here, which was brought to the RSC Complete Works Festival in 2007.

Neil Bartlett
, born in 1958, is a director, performer, translator, and writer. He was an early member of the theater company Complicite, and has directed at the National Theatre, the Royal Court, the Goodman in Chicago, and the American Repertory Theater in Boston. From 1988 to 1998 he was a member of GLORIA, with whom he created thirteen original pieces including
Sarrasine
and
A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep;
from 1994 to 2005 he was artistic director of the Lyric Hammersmith in London, where his thirty-one productions included stagings of Wilde, Maugham, Shaw, Rattigan, Stevenson, Dickens, Britten, Shakespeare, Molière, Marivaux, Balzac, Genet, and Kleist. He has written plays, acclaimed novels, and a book mediating gay experience through the figure of Oscar Wilde (Who
Was That Man
). His RSC productions include
Romeo and Juliet
and the gender-bending Edwardian-dress 2007 Courtyard Theatre
Twelfth Night
that he talks about here.

Mendes:
It’s a mystery to me. I can see why he chose not to call it “Malvolio” in the Folio, as it is so much larger than that, and I can see why he chose not to call it
What You Will
, as it sounds too much like
As You Like It
. But I think the title that he ended up with seems to promise a night of revelry, festivity, and disorder, and that of course is not what the play is. So I’ve always suspected it was a last-minute compromise!

Donnellan:
Twelfth Night
, for me, is a highly significant title. Twelfth Night, or 6 January, is the occasion for the Feast of Fools when masters and servants reversed status and played each other. But more significantly Twelfth Night is also the Feast of the Epiphany. A
solemn feast of the Catholic church, it is the night of the Magi’s visit to the Christ child. But the significance of the visit is immense, for it was the first moment when people in our world realized who Jesus actually was. His significance was understood. This moment of realization or revelation is central to Christian thinking, as it is the moment when the immanent is made manifest. The moment of human perception of the divine. Many writers, like James Joyce, were deeply concerned with this moment, and Shakespeare’s plays are full of epiphanic revelations. For example, in many of the comedies, the heroine, filled with the spirit of active love, goes into disguise and her final unmasking is epiphanic. But we don’t need to know the word “epiphany” to feel what it is. Falling in love can have the quality of epiphany, of understanding not so much a new thing, as suddenly and gloriously realizing what was always waiting there. When we feel “I love you” we may also feel “I will always love you,” but when that love is very deep, we may also have the uncanny feeling “and I have always loved you!” When Viola and Sebastian recognize each other in mysterious images of time, change, and death, we are moved because it connects with our own sense of falling in love, with epiphany. On the other hand, the tragedy of Othello resides in his being unable to recognize this love in Desdemona.

Bartlett:
The play is written under the sign of festivity, of license, of misbehavior. But it’s not called “First Night”; this is the time when things go a bit too far, when people are at the end of their tether …

In Shakespeare’s time, Illyria was a state on the Adriatic coast (Croatia today), but the name is also evocative of “illusion” and “lyric” (“If music be …”) and “Elysium”: so should we think of it as a place of reality or of fantasy? And did your thinking along those lines shape you and your designer’s choice of set, costumes, and temporal location?

Mendes:
I didn’t think of it as a place of reality at all. For me it was a place of illusion. The thing that came most to my mind when I was working on it was
Alice Through the Looking Glass
—Lewis Carroll’s twisted logic, his peculiar brand of English melancholy. We even had
Viola step through a looking glass. I tried very hard right from the start to create a sense of it being a dreamscape. When Emily Watson, who played Viola, arrived in Illyria she was talking to a succession of mysterious figures in the shadows—one wasn’t sure if she was awake or dreaming. And yet, rather like Lewis Carroll, once we entered this world, once we went down the rabbit hole, there were many things about it that reminded us of England, and of a specific social structure. When we took it to Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, beyond the mirror was an enormous pool, almost like a lake, covered with floating candles. Candles were also suspended over the acting area in both directions. That was a nod to the candlelight by which the play might first have been performed, and also to the sense of Christmas time and of Twelfth Night itself, but that gave it an even more dreamlike feel. So our Illyria had a firmly nonnaturalistic framework holding within it something resembling a real world.

Donnellan:
All of Shakespeare’s plays take place first and foremost on a stage, and this space changes and articulates shifting worlds and different realities. For example, in the history plays Shakespeare is not putting the “real” medieval world on stage but creating another theatrical world. We cannot understand Shakespeare if we reduce him to an everyday naturalism or historical accuracy. If we get locked in the merciless logic of spatial or indeed psychological logic, we miss the point.

In
Twelfth Night
Shakespeare presents a number of different worlds. There is the world of Olivia’s house, which is very different to Orsino’s court; running between them is the dangerous space of the path that separates these masculine and feminine spaces. Danger hides on this path, but so does love. Pirates get arrested but rings are found.

For me as a director, “space” is the very first challenge to be investigated. Investigating the worlds of Shakespeare’s plays is the first step in all our rehearsals.

Bartlett:
I think you have to play for real, and let the fantastical take care of itself—at least you do when you are working in the Courtyard Theatre, where no one needs to be told they are in the world of
theater and make-believe. There were certain specific realities I wanted to root the play in. It is a play about the strictly hierarchical, upstairs/downstairs life of two aristocratic country houses. It is a play in which homoeroticism has to be part of the cultural zeitgeist, so that neither Antonio’s homosexuality nor Orsino’s … confusion (!) need any great explanation. It is a play in which we have to take for granted that a single woman as intelligent and wealthy as Olivia can both dream of running her own life and yet absolutely be denied that possibility by her society—i.e. everyone expects that she should marry her neighbor now that her brother and father are both dead. A costume-drama version of the turn of the nineteenth century seemed to provide all the right clues … but apart from the costumes, the stage was bare—letting the words and the music and the laughs do the work.

In one obvious respect our production was “fantastical”—in order to provide more good roles for women than is normally possible in a Shakespeare company, I cast three actresses in three of the male roles, capitalizing on the fact that cross-dressing and sexual license and low comedy are all central to both the atmosphere and the mechanics of this particular play. If men can drag up on
Twelfth Night
, then surely women can too.

Social status is a big part of the comedy. Did that also affect the period and setting you chose for the play?

Mendes:
Yes, the world of the play needs a hierarchy, especially in Olivia’s household. So that of course did affect the settings and clothes. I feel you do need to sense that Sir Toby and Maria are somehow “below stairs” in the servants’ quarters; you need a sense that Malvolio is a steward, that Fabian is a footman of some sort. Beyond that, the one character who I felt needed to be defined and clarified by costuming was Feste. My feeling with all Shakespearean fools is that they need to be firmly rooted in the world of the play; the moment they stand outside it and don the comedy checked suit and a little trilby your heart sinks. So for me, Feste was a tramp, a drifter; he’s been in the household before, he’s gone away for a while, he’s moneyless, he travels with a knapsack and his guitar. It seemed to me to be
very important that you get the sense of him as somebody who might be found on a street corner, with his cap in hand, begging for coins. He’s obviously impoverished and he obviously needs to earn a crust. That was important, as it somewhat clarified his dislike of Malvolio.

And of course for Malvolio’s downfall to work he needs to be established as a household steward. Then when he attempts to seduce Olivia, he is attempting to subvert the social order, to overturn the hierarchy of the household.

Donnellan:
Our approach to the play and its period and setting is fluid throughout the rehearsal process; but of course no human beings have ever invented any world devoid of status or hierarchy (though many have died in the attempt!).

Bartlett:
See my previous answer!

Shakespeare had boy–girl twins, who are never identical, but mistaken identity is at the heart of the play: how much of a factor is the “identical twin” question in casting Viola and Sebastian?

Mendes:
I remember casting
Troilus and Cressida
at the RSC when Nick Hytner was also casting
King Lear
, and Nick said, “Oh, how much the twins look alike is the sort of thing that boring people talk about in the car on the way home!” Clearly you shouldn’t cast two people who look wildly different, but whatever they look like, two good actors will move you in that final reconciliation scene come what may—it’s a beautiful scene. Beyond that, dress them in the same clothes, the same hat, and if they’re vaguely the same height that should be enough.

Donnellan:
To a certain degree, and we would certainly avoid choosing actors who looked wildly different, but we also rely on the fact that the audience have both the desire and the capacity to suspend their disbelief!

Bartlett:
Provided that one isn’t a foot shorter than the other, the rest is acting—and pacing; if you stage the “near misses” of one scene moving into another right, then the audience does all the work of the doubling for you.

What does disguise—and playing at gender-bending in particular—do for Viola?

Donnellan:
I think it’s more important to ask what these elements do for us. The complexity of love and particularly the fragility of human desire and sexuality is so crafted by Shakespeare that most, if not all, of his plays leave us asking questions about ourselves. Certainly the ambivalence of sexuality as it is figured by Shakespeare in
Twelfth Night
transcends most modern reductions into gay and straight.

Bartlett:
Initially, it allows her to maintain some privacy while she sorts herself out—then it allows her everything; to lie, to flirt, to be with men … to explore herself. She needs to do this, because she’s a powerless girl: Olivia and Maria manage to do all of those things without cross-dressing, but they’re older, and wiser—and desperate!

“Cesario, come—For so you shall be, while you are a man”: whereas Rosalind in
As You Like It
and Portia in
The Merchant of Venice
return at the end in female garb, Viola remains in male. We’re even told that the Captain who is looking after her women’s clothes has been imprisoned at the behest of Malvolio. Is this just a technicality: there’s no time for a quick change? Or does it go deeper?

Mendes:
I don’t think Shakespeare ever does something like that accidentally. I think it does run deeper. I think the sexual ambiguity, which he plays on the whole time, is something he wants to linger on at the end, and I think it makes it much more interesting. You could say that what fascinates Shakespeare most of all are the unfinished stories, Iago, Leontes, Jaques—and here, of course, Malvolio. “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” is the line that hangs over the end of the play even more than Viola’s last moments, or “The Wind and the Rain.”