It would be hard to imagine a Twelfth Night more sublime than the one currently playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Quiet, elegant, lush, mysterious, and romantic, it features Emily Watson as Viola and Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio and—like the production of Uncle Vanya with which it runs in rep through March 9—it was directed by Sam Mendes, late of London’s Donmar Warehouse Theater, where the two productions premiered last fall.
In an earlier life, the Donmar—known simply as The Warehouse—was the secondary London base of the Royal Shakespeare Company, as it was then called. That was back when the RSC—whose primary base was always at Stratford-on-Avon—still used the Aldwych Theater as its mainstage in London, before the company’s current home at the Barbican was built in the early 80s. Ten years ago, Mendes rescued and renamed the space and almost immediately turned it into one of the city’s most vital sources of new work.
In the meantime, he has met with success in other, more commercial arenas, as a filmmaker (he directed American Beauty and Road to Perdition) and as a sort of latter-day, sophisticated Hal Prince. (Mendes’ revival of Cabaret, which began at the Donmar and is currently in its fifth year on Broadway, has become one of New York theater’s money machines.) Last December, Mendes announced his intention of stepping down as head of the Donmar and forming his own production company. Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya were Mendes’ farewell productions.
Performed by a single cast, they offer New Yorkers a chance to see classical theater performed in repertory, a pleasure we have not had since the mid-80s, when the RSC came to New York with Terry Hands’ productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac. The BAM engagement echoes that earlier visit in a number of ways. It, too, was a pairing of productions—one Shakespeare, one not—built around two headliners (Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack), but whose actual impact and memorability had less to do with individual performances than with the pleasure of watching great ensemble acting.
There’s an extra cleverness to the casting here. The two plays were chosen for the echoes that exist between the respective patterns of unrequited love they explore. In Twelfth Night, Viola loves Orsino, who pines for Olivia, of whom Malvolio absurdly dreams. In Vanya, Sonya loves Astrov, who pines for Yelena, of whom Vanya—but you get the idea. It’s an ingenious insight and it has Ms. Watson, over the course of both plays—which you can see in one day if you opt for a weekend double-header—consistently mooning (as Viola and Sonya) over Mark Strong (as Orsino and Astrov) and Mr. Strong and Mr. Russell Beale (as Malvolio and Vanya) over Helen McCrory (as Olivia and Yelena). More interestingly, perhaps, it gives Mr. Russell Beale a chance to play two very different versions of the Malcontent and Ms. Watson comic and tragic versions of hopeless love.
As was the case with the two RSC repertory productions, this Vanya and Twelfth Night share a design team: Anthony Ward (sets), Mark Thompson (costumes) and George Stiles (music). Indeed, a preponderance of music was another element that, Mendes saw, the two plays have in common—or perhaps an attention to the idea of music. Twelfth Night is among Shakespeare’s most music-oriented plays (consider Orsino’s famous opening line, Viola’s “Make me a willow cabin at your gate”–speech and the raucous midnight serenade that gives rise to Sir Toby’s remark about cakes and ale. Vanya has that heartbreaking second-act close, which never fails to shock, no matter how many times we’ve seen it. (Yelena, about to sit down to a rhapsodic session at the piano, is forestalled by the bald, prosaic, “He says no.”) There’s also the figure of the broken-down former landowner Telegin (he of the poor complexion) forever hanging about the Serebryakov estate and strumming a guitar.
Stiles’ settings for Feste’s songs in Twelfth Night are among the production’s many charms, another being the performance of Anthony O’Donnell, who plays both Feste and Telegin using the same guitar in both plays. It’s one of the two most successful bits of double casting—here in New York at any rate. (I don’t know how it was in London.) The other is Mr. Strong’s quiet, restrained, and—consequently—wildly sexy Astrov and Orsino.
Brian Friel’s extremely free translation gives O’Donnell a lot to work with, inventing an amusing (and audience-pleasing) fixation with Germany for Telegin, for instance. In other ways Friel’s Vanya sometimes seems less felicitous. It’s long on wit; I found it a little short on grief, though. There’s nothing like the parallel that his Dublin-tinged Three Sisters sought to draw between the impoverished Russian and Irish aristocracies. It doesn’t, like Mamet’s version of Vanya, fashion from the text a kind of poetry of inarticulate disappointment and disillusion. Rather, Friel grants Vanya a verbal agility and acumen that may leave you wondering what keeps him weltering in his slough of despond. He almost turns Vanya into a kind of proto–Sheridan Whiteside, all biting scorn and irony. This gives Mr. Beale a chance to show us a more extreme form of the irascibility we see in his Malvolio, but I found myself missing a sense of the needlessness of Vanya’s plight: the degree to which he is keeping himself in his abyss of frustration. Also, it leaves him ranting in the great confrontation with Serebryakov, and ranting Vanyas are something we’ve seen many, many times before. It’s the sort of performance that’s critic-friendly (i.e., easy to describe) but that doesn’t, I think, really move anyone to the depths of their soul.
Ms. Watson and Ms. McCrory also come off better in Twelfth Night than they do in the Chekhov. As Viola, Ms. Watson shows an uncanny ability to bring a contemporary logic to the cadences of poetry and an even more uncanny ability to walk and stand and move like a very young man. (This seems to have something to do with denying the existence of her waist.) She’s so luminous and charismatic, though, that hiding her light as Sonya is a bit of a problem. She has to work hard in order to seem homely and pathetic, and Sonya becomes somewhat irritating as a result. Ms. McCrory, who makes a winning Olivia (she looks and sounds a little like the very young Glynis Johns), plays all Yelena’s unconscious motivation on the surface. She actually seems hot for Astrov and contemptuous of Sonya rather than careless and unwittingly destructive. It’s an absence of subtext that keeps this Vanya from rising above the level of any other production. Here, the way the characters see things is the way they are.
In New York, attention has focused mostly on the Chekhov, but it was Twelfth Night that really blew me away. It’s an example of an approach to Shakespeare that seems second-nature to the British and that we very rarely see. (The vastly underrated Globe production of Cymbeline that BAM presented last year was another.) It’s a style hugely driven by textual analysis, but to call it “academic” would be to make it sound static, whereas the whole point is that it rests on a dynamic realization of Shakespeare’s systems of imagery.
Chiefly, it’s characterized by two things: non-realistic and non-literal staging. The first consists in a series of periodic reminders that we are watching a play. This often begins with a refusal to locate the production in any particular time or place. Ward’s set for Illyria is an evocation of nowhere and everywhere. The stage, open to the back of the theater, is dominated by a single outsized picture frame, centrally placed, that stands midway between the apron and the back wall, at about the point where we would expect a backdrop. Between it and the back wall is a sea of flickering light created by hundreds of candlesticks of differing lengths laid out on the floor and hundreds of lanterns hung from the flies at varying heights. Such scenic elements as are present are either non-specific (a huge vase of arum lilies) or eclectic (a contemporary sofa, an antique French chair). Similarly with the costumes, which rhyme with clothing from a number of different periods: Edwardian (Malvolio), the 1930s (Maria and the other serving women), Restoration (Viola and Sebastian), late Victorian (Orsino).
What this kind of staging does is disarm us intellectually, taking the onus of plausibility off the play—with its unlikely elements, contrivances, and plot devices—and placing it on the human element. We’re seduced into “believing” what’s happening between Viola and Olivia or Orsino on a moment by moment basis because, say, an inconsequential scene between servants was played as a staged reading. The result is that we experience the multiple emotional levels and layers of meaning more viscerally and more immediately.
The second ingredient, the non-literal aspect of this style of Shakespeare production, is exemplified here by that central picture frame, which turns out to be the key to the production. It serves several purposes, functioning sometimes as a literal portrait—as at the beginning of the play when Orsino seems to be gazing at a painting of the Lady Olivia because Ms. McCrory is standing motionless behind the frame—and sometimes like a doorway through which characters enter a scene. From time to time, characters will go and stand in the frame when there clearly isn’t supposed to be a literal portrait present, simply because another character is speaking or thinking of them.
Eventually, a point comes where we’re forced to ask ourselves whether the frame was ever, even in the opening scene, meant to represent an actual, literal portrait. We’re forced to conclude not: Orsino’s portrait of Olivia in mourning was something that could not be. So we’re forced to wonder what the frame is doing there. It turns out to be a metaphor, a physical expression of the extent to which the actions of all the characters are founded on pictures of their own making, pictures of themselves and one another. It has its payoff in the closing scene, when the happy resolution of the plot is played out—literally—against a backdrop of the subplot: poor, straitjacketed Mr. Beale, as Malvolio, seated within the confines of the frame.