Ruth Leon recommends… Twelfth Night – Globe Player
Ruth Leon recommendsTwelfth Night – Globe Player
2012
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2021
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Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night doesn’t have much to do with Christmas so far as I can see, since its first production was in February, not on January 5th, but we know that it was written to celebrate the end of the Christmas season in 1601.
The Elizabethan Festival of Twelfth Night would have involved servants dressing up as their masters, and men as women, and this history of festive ritual and carnivalesque reversal is the cultural origin of the play’s gender-confusion-driven plot. The play has long been regarded as preserving this festive and traditional atmosphere of licensed disorder.
In our time, twelfth night is the date when decorations have to come down, leaving pine needles everywhere and broken baubles on the carpet.
Shakespeare’s Globe has two productions of Twelfth Night. One is my favourite of all the Globe Player productions, the 2012 one where Mark Rylance, then the Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, played Viola in an all-male production, with Stephen Fry as one of the best Malvolios ever.
The other is a modern-dress, mostly female, production from last year, starring the most recent Artistic Director, Michelle Terry, as Viola, and Sophie Russell as Malvolio. They are very different and there’s much to enjoy in both so I’ve given you both links.
I love this production for so many different reasons. Not only for Mark Rylance’s marvellous Olivia and Stephen Fry’s fabulous Malvolio, but also for Roger Lloyd Pack’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Paul Chahidi’s Maria, and the rest of the cast are great too. There’s also a haunting choral rendition of ‘Hey Robin’ which opens the second half – perfect for this dark comedy.