pebblerocker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
pebblerocker) wrote2010-08-24 09:14 pm
pebblerocker) wrote2010-08-24 09:14 pm
Entry tags:
Shakespeare!
Well! Twelfth Night was fantastic. I loved the lighting, the music, the actors. Olivia and Viola were both very good, Feste the fool was just amazing. A very talented man, agile and energetic with a good singing voice. I loved the way he was always turning up on the edge of the action throughout the play. He'd interact with the other characters, he'd address the audience, he'd do a silly dance, he'd vanish again -- but I had the feeling he knew everything that was going on and enjoyed watching the others going through their problems, as if he was really the main character and was amusing himself by giving himself a small cameo in their story and allowing them to think of him as unimportant.
Enjoyed the shipwreck very much, done well with lighting and music; Viola's twin Sebastian, rescued from the sea by totally gay pirate Antonio, must have been running around with a mouthful of water which he spat into the air while being revived and we all laughed.
Malvolio was terrific at the start, sweeping around being dignified and telling people off for singing too loud. When he turned up grinning all over his face in ghastly yellow pants was a good laugh! But his eventual fate was most sad and I wished he'd been allowed to retain a little of his dignity at the end.
The romance dynamics were interesting... one expects stories written in historical times (before, say, 1980) to have young women falling in love with much older men, which is not my kink at all but has to be accepted as the way things went back then. I might have been better able to believe Viola's claims of being deeply in love with the Duke if the guy had been better-looking and had more stage presence. Then the age thing is reversed with young Viola/Cesario/Sebastian being pursued by Olivia, who was played by a woman -- I'm hopeless at guessing ages -- in her late thirties or early fifties. I found it a bit creepy when Viola tells Olivia she's not interested and Olivia won't back off; that issue was a bit confused though since Viola often seemed attracted to Olivia -- I'm sure she went well beyond her duties in delivering the Duke's messages of love to Olivia and started flirting on her own behalf several times!
At the end, of course, Viola's identical twin Sebastian turns up, the truth comes out, Olivia marries Sebastian and Viola, revealed as a woman, marries the Duke. Happy endings all round, except for poor old Malvolio. Only... Olivia comes up to Sebastian, who has never seen her in his life, talking like she knows him, calling him by someone else's name, and asks him to marry her, and he doesn't say "hey lady, you've got the wrong person," he just thinks "oh cool" and goes along with it. And once Olivia finds out that he's not the person she spent all that time with and fell in love with, he's just someone who looks similar, but she's fine with that because he's hot. They deserve each other, the pair of them! (Poor old gay pirate Antonio doesn't get a happy ending.)
My friend was playing Fabian, one of the smaller parts; he said afterwards that he didn't get any characterisation or development at all, Shakespeare had just squirted a bit of Fabian into scenes as needed like gap filler. But he got a scene with nearly every major character, including a very good bit helping Viola to prepare for her sword-fight, and Fabian gets the line "If this were played upon a stage, I would condemn it as a most improbable fiction" which I loved.
It was such fun seeing the play that my sister and I decided we'll go and see plays more often in future even if we don't know someone in them. I'd quite like to see Twelfth Night again done by a different group and find out how my impression of it changes with different people telling the story.
Enjoyed the shipwreck very much, done well with lighting and music; Viola's twin Sebastian, rescued from the sea by totally gay pirate Antonio, must have been running around with a mouthful of water which he spat into the air while being revived and we all laughed.
Malvolio was terrific at the start, sweeping around being dignified and telling people off for singing too loud. When he turned up grinning all over his face in ghastly yellow pants was a good laugh! But his eventual fate was most sad and I wished he'd been allowed to retain a little of his dignity at the end.
The romance dynamics were interesting... one expects stories written in historical times (before, say, 1980) to have young women falling in love with much older men, which is not my kink at all but has to be accepted as the way things went back then. I might have been better able to believe Viola's claims of being deeply in love with the Duke if the guy had been better-looking and had more stage presence. Then the age thing is reversed with young Viola/Cesario/Sebastian being pursued by Olivia, who was played by a woman -- I'm hopeless at guessing ages -- in her late thirties or early fifties. I found it a bit creepy when Viola tells Olivia she's not interested and Olivia won't back off; that issue was a bit confused though since Viola often seemed attracted to Olivia -- I'm sure she went well beyond her duties in delivering the Duke's messages of love to Olivia and started flirting on her own behalf several times!
At the end, of course, Viola's identical twin Sebastian turns up, the truth comes out, Olivia marries Sebastian and Viola, revealed as a woman, marries the Duke. Happy endings all round, except for poor old Malvolio. Only... Olivia comes up to Sebastian, who has never seen her in his life, talking like she knows him, calling him by someone else's name, and asks him to marry her, and he doesn't say "hey lady, you've got the wrong person," he just thinks "oh cool" and goes along with it. And once Olivia finds out that he's not the person she spent all that time with and fell in love with, he's just someone who looks similar, but she's fine with that because he's hot. They deserve each other, the pair of them! (Poor old gay pirate Antonio doesn't get a happy ending.)
My friend was playing Fabian, one of the smaller parts; he said afterwards that he didn't get any characterisation or development at all, Shakespeare had just squirted a bit of Fabian into scenes as needed like gap filler. But he got a scene with nearly every major character, including a very good bit helping Viola to prepare for her sword-fight, and Fabian gets the line "If this were played upon a stage, I would condemn it as a most improbable fiction" which I loved.
It was such fun seeing the play that my sister and I decided we'll go and see plays more often in future even if we don't know someone in them. I'd quite like to see Twelfth Night again done by a different group and find out how my impression of it changes with different people telling the story.
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Your post reminds me: I'd love for someone more skilled than I to write a sequel to this play: a black comedy, in which Malvolio plots to carry out his final threat: I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you.
And therein, we could perhaps see some of Sabastian's psychology -- what happened to him, while he was away from Viola, that lent him to accept Olivia's declaration of love so easily, anyway? Had he come so close to death (at least, in his mind) that he made a bargain with God or himself to accept whatever fate life would throw in his path, should he survive?