A cynical view of love

I pitied the cast of MADC’s Twelfth Night (Greek Theatre, Maria Regina, Blata l-Bajda) for having to perform much of the time through a tremendous blitz of petards and other hellish devices produced by a neighbouring feast.

Thank the Lord they had an admirable audience who sat through about two-and-a-half hours of performance and actually enjoyed it.

Luckily in these circumstances, the production by David Barton stays well away from the play’s lyrical and sentimental moments and moods.

In fact, what you get is a noisy and farcical comedy in which laughter, roistering and sending up of sentiment predominate.

Significantly, the famous opening speech by Orsino (John Marinelli), “If music be the food of love” is interrupted half way through by boisterous modern pop music – the production is set in our time – and a dance vigorous performed by the entire company.

It is this music and not Orsino’s or Viola’s elegantly poetical discursions on love that marks the production’s heart, and indeed I would say that the character given the greatest importance by the director is Feste, the jester, who is played and sung very skilfully by Luke Farrugia, a young man of whom I have no doubt we shall hear much more.

This Feste throws off his cynical comments with admirable lightness, is clearly meant to be gay and with a passion for his guitarist (not in Shakespeare’s cast). No wonder he cannot take seriously the hetero love affairs springing around him.

The Greek Theatre is not an ideal venue for a large-scale production, and if the production makes use of a set that is minimal and not very attractive, while the lighting is not very inventive, visually it has to depend on costumes; but then of course productions in the late 16th century did exactly this.

Even here, the only colour came from the low comedy characters – Edward Mercieca’s Sir Toby Belch, Colin Willis’s Sir Andrew Aguecheek and, of course, Farrugia’s Feste with his array ofcostumes. Maria (Pia Zammit) is presented like a chamber-maid, and not as Olivia’s companion and confidante, and so comes arrayed in traditional black frock and white pinny. On the other hand, Orsino’s court is as dull as they come, and even poor Viola (Simone Spiteri) is in a grey suit and tie. Orsino himself is garbed for most of the play in an elegant dressing-gown and changes into an ice-cream suit in the last scene.

Perhaps Barton wishes to tell us that true life is enjoyed by the unruly and amoral characters and not by aristocratic specialists in the subtleties of the emotions.

Orsino himself has to settle for marriage to Viola, who certainly adores him, when Olivia (Laura Best) whom he desires, unexpectedly marries someone else, and even Olivia has to be contented with second best for the person she marries is not the charming Viola/Cesario with whom she is besotted, but Viola’s aggressive identical twin, Sebastian (Philip Leone Ganado).

Of the four, it is only Viola who marries the person she really wants, so the ending perhaps deserves the ironical chorus with which the production ends. On the other hand, Maria does get her Sir Toby, broken head and all.

Incidentally, Barton has done without Shakespeare’s songs written for the play, so fans of the play will certainly miss O Mistress Mine, Come away, Death and When that I was and a little tiny bo”, all of which he has replaced with songs of our times which older people like me do not know and mostly care little about.

Spiteri’s Viola is refreshingly unlike many a Viola I have seen, but she is not the heroine Shakespeare had in mind, deeply in love with Orsino, but utterly loyal in her wooing of Olivia, her rival, on Orsino’s behalf.

This Viola, however charming, is simply playing a game, and when in her first encounter with Olivia she sees her rival’s beauty face to face her praise sounds insincere, and her account of how she would woo Olivia, were she Orsino, is not romantic but matter-of-fact.

Again, in her scenes with Orsino I felt the tension between her pretended feelings and her disguised ones only rarely. This tension I could feel in her speaking of her great “patience upon a monument” speech to Orsino, but even here the poetry came out palely.

Spiteri is a fine actress, and though this Viola may not be the character I think Shakespeare visualised, she comes truly alive as a young woman of our times, brave and ready to accept life as she finds it. If, as I hope, we see more of her work in Shakespeare, my advice is to pay more attention to diction and verbal music, andto combat her habit of rushing important speeches.

Mercieca, Willis and Zammit made a good trio of those rascals whose bad behaviour appears to them to be normal. Mercieca’s Belch has coarseness in his very soul, and even his courtship of Maria has nothing even remotely fine about it and is reciprocated by Maria’s determination to have him by devising outrageous things that will amuse him no end.

Colin Willis (an excellent Malvolio in the 2001 production) is gloriously funny as Sir Andrew: ambitious but aware of his shortcomings, amazingly ignorant, and a shocking coward. His adoration of Sir Toby is pitiful and surely undeserving of Toby’s rejection of him at the end. Zammit’s saucy Maria and Nathan Brimmer’s shrewd Fabian complete this fine group.

Manuel Cauchi is not one of the grand Malvolios but a small one with ambitions of greatness. He was uproariously funny not so much in the letter scene, which Barton over-directed, as in his yellow stockings scene with Olivia where his impudence reached a high degree of fatuousness.

Like Joe Friggieri in 1987, Barton chose to have Malvolio visible onstage in the dark room scene, and this worked well especially because of Feste’s hilarious playing as the curate Sir Topas talking to his real self.

Laura Best’s Olivia is not just a noblewoman who, against all rules, pursues Orsino’s envoy shamelessly, but allows her sexual obsession to sexually assault Viola/Cesario, and to shout at times like a washerwoman.

In his direction of Viola and Olivia, Barton has gone too far in order to present new readings of these two important characters.

John Marinelli, the MADC specialist in Shakespearean verse, speaks it beautifully as expected, but was the greatest victim of the feast bombardment.