Theatre review: Twelfth Night, or What You Will(Regent's Park Open Air Theatre)

Well it's a good job I'm already more than familiar with the plot of this one, because any show featuring Nicholas Karimi as a sugar daddy in a low-cut top is going to be a tricky one to remember anything else about. Drew McOnie's first season of programming at Regent's Park Open Air Theatre starts with Twelfth Night, but it does share a thematic connection with his predecessor's final production, La Cage Aux Folles: Owen Horsley sets his production in a faded cabaret club, and even gives us a drag queen version of Sir Toby Belch. If the club's not heaving with customers it's probably because the owner, Olivia (Anna Francolini) has imposed a lengthy period of mourning for her dead brother, whose ashes she carries around with her everywhere, addressing her soliloquies to the urn. One regular patron is Orsino (Raphael Bushay,) who's performatively in love with Olivia, and keeps hoping despite all signs to the contrary that he might be able to woo her.

In fact love will bring her back to the world, not for Orsino but for his new messenger, Cesario. Who is unfortunately not interested in Olivia because he is in fact a shipwrecked young woman, Viola (Evelyn Miller,) in disguise and in love with Orsino herself.

Meanwhile her uncle Sir Toby and the rest of Olivia's household try to party through the sombre restrictions she's imposed, enforced by her humourless steward Malvolio (Richard Cant.) Olivia's maid Maria (Anita Reynolds) devises a plan to humiliate Malvolio, but in the hands of Sir Toby and his hangers-on this goes into particularly cruel territory. It's due to this, as well as the multiple characters grieving family members they (rightly or wrongly) believe to be dead, that Twelfth Night is often described as a particularly melancholy comedy, or even Shakespeare's farewell to his early, broader comic style.

When that latter old chestnut gets rolled out it usually means the production has spent so much time on being wistful it forgot to be funny, but while this melancholy is dealt with quite consciously here, I have to say I found Horsley's production hugely likeable despite not seeing it under the best conditions (the venue was far from sold out, especially in the more expensive seats; as the Open Air doesn't seem to do upgrades in these circumstances, that meant the cast delivering their lines past a vast wall of silence to get to the people chuckling quietly in the distance.)

I think even packed this probably wouldn't be the most raucous production ever seen, but it does hit the major comic notes well enough, including the major setpieces of the gulling of Malvolio - here Cant ends up in yellow lederhosen. The climactic resolution of all the confused plots also works very well, including Viola's being set up in a duel with Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Matthew Spencer,) each being convinced the other is a formidable killer.

Much of the success in bringing out the sadder side is in the use of music: Feste (Julie Legrand) still performs some of the songs, but with a couple of established musical theatre stars in the cast it would be a shame not to share them out, and so Olivia enters with a showstopping big number that nicely encompasses the balance between comedy and tragedy: A big, belting torch song that's still couched in a sense of the ridiculous as she gets tangled in her overly elaborate mourning veils and trains. As she comes back out of her shell we get the impression that Olivia's performances were the big crowd draw back when the club was successful, and why wouldn't they be with Francolini's voice ringing out into the night.

This is also a production that embraces the play's queerness in comparatively subtle ways: Michael Matus's Toby might be a drag queen, but he's an embittered, faded one, more often than not to be found sitting grumpily with his wig off. Rather than huge spectacular dresses, Ryan Dawson Laight this time gives us a more retro undercurrent of queerness by theming the club's employees' outfits, and many of the other characters' costumes, around sailor suits. And while I still think Fabian (Jon Trenchard) is a weirdly pointless character, what better way to make him fit in than by camply rechristening him Fab Ian?

It's not unusual to see the queerness of the relationship between Antonio (Karimi) and Sebastian (Andro Cowperthwaite) spelled out on stage these days, but Horsley goes one step further here: The marriage between Sebastian and Olivia is dubious to say the least, and here once the confusions have all been resolved Sebastian leaves it behind to go back to Antonio. Which is fair enough because, as previously noted, it's Nicholas Karimi as a sugar daddy in a low-cut top.

And for all that this is a Twelfth Night that embraces the sadness, this makes for a more hopeful ending than the original: Instead of Feste being left behind alone, we get Olivia and her chosen family, perhaps not ending in fireworks but not alone either. It feels odd to praise a production for its melancholy since I so often use that as shorthand for one that's focused on the wrong things, but here it's like the jazzy musical numbers that are genuinely moving, while maintaining just the right sense of the ridiculous at how overwrought the lyrics are: This gets the balance just right.

Twelfth Night, or What You Will by William Shakespeare is booking until the 8th of June at the Open Air Theatre, Regent's Park.

Running time: 2 hours 50 minutes including interval.

Photo credit: Rich Lakos.