Twelfth Night or What You Will: a 'riotous' late-summer jamboree
If you seek the "fashionable Elizabethan melancholy" that has dominated so many productions of "Twelfth Night", you should "pack up your lyre and go elsewhere", said Rachel Halliburton in The Times. Robin Belfield's "carnivalesque" new staging of Shakespeare's "tale of mistaken identities and thwarted desires" at the Globe is a "riotous celebration of life".
Belfield emphasises the farcical elements and the themes of gender and sexual fluidity, said Dzifa Benson in The Daily Telegraph – while Jean Chan's design adds to the mood of "licensed disorder", with a gleeful mishmash of eras and styles. With strong acting and a vibrant comic energy, it makes for a late-summer "jamboree" that's "joyfully tongue-in-cheek".
"The production is studded with lovely performances," said Sarah Hemming in the Financial Times. Ronke Adékoluejó makes a "keenly intelligent and vividly impulsive" Viola; Laura Hanna impresses as Olivia; and Pearce Quigley's Malvolio is "extremely droll". But what's almost entirely missing are the "nuanced depths" of the best versions of "Twelfth Night".
Subtlety is hard to convey in the wide open spaces of the Globe's yard, but this production "barely bothers with it at all", said Alun Hood on WhatsOnStage. It seems many of the actors have been directed to "mug, sashay and bawl their way through the play to such an extent that the characters feel less like real people than random assemblages of funny walks, facial tics and line deliveries ranging from flat to shrill". At times, the results are very funny – but the "poetry and exquisite melancholy of Shakespeare's text go for almost nothing".
Certainly, this staging is "extremely knockabout, steering away from the play's anguished layers", said Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. The pangs of unrequited desire – the very heart of "Twelfth Night" – are never quite felt, and the angst of the central romances is "swallowed up by laughter and lightness". In some cases, too, the verse is "dampened by unremarkable delivery". For all that, though, this production has "oodles of charm and midsummer madness". "Make of it what you will, I suppose."
Globe Theatre, London SE1. Until 25 October, shakespearesglobe.com