I typically associate Kenneth Branagh’s Shakespeare with massive sets and budgets, star-studded casting and him doubling up as director and lead, all of which can have a variety of effects. Sometimes it’s very good, sometimes it’s very mixed, and sometimes it’s a little bit painful. However, this was nothing like what I expected. He stuck to directing this time, and the sets were fairly low-key: nice, but average looking, and clearly not made with the budget of his later films.
Branagh’s main conception with the set design was to set up what he described as a Dickensian Christmasland, as a beautiful snowy place where the faults and problems lay beneath the beautiful exterior. Like in the play, where the supposedly happy marriages in the end cover up the darkness, this winter wonderland was largely superficial. They didn’t quite have the budget to make it as beautiful as he wanted, but, for the most part, I found it successful, though at times they laid it on a bit too thickly. For instance, the “Twelve Days of Christmas” sung by the drunken Belch and Co. seemed unnecessary, as did the Christmas tree, strung up with lights in the middle of Olivia’s garden. It was too much, and I didn’t find it nearly as illuminating as Branagh evidently thought it was.
Viola is usually viewed as the main character of Twelfth Night, but Francis Barber’s Viola seemed very lifeless to me. She spent the whole play hovering on the verge of tears, and there was little of her vivacity or quick wit. Those two factors, in combination, made her a very one-note Viola, who was satisfactory but not particularly engaging or interesting. It also took the punch out of her tearful reunion with her brother. She’d been tearing up for the last two and a half hours, so seeing her tear up again didn’t really get much of a reaction from the audience. Moreover, it was hard to feel much for her except for just simple, detached pity because there wasn’t much else to her except an unfortunate situation. The only scene where she really shone was the one where she was forced into the “swordfight” with Sir Andrew Aguecheeck. Her terror mounts and mounts until finally she loses control and yells at the top of her lungs as they’re being shoved together. It could have been overdone, and it sounds that way from my description, but Barber made it truly hilarious; my eleven-year-old sister and I both broke down laughing and had to pause the DVD for a minute so we didn’t miss anything.
As if to make up for Barber being a sub-par, though tolerable Viola, the rest of the cast was quite good. All were funny and seemed to capture their characters well, though some were more successful than others.
James Simmons played Aguecheek as one of the most hilariously stupid people to exist. He never really understood any of what was going on around him; his face was perpetually blank and staring as if trying to make sense of it all. Whenever he spoke a temporary look of relief would pass over his face, as though he was thinking “Aah, I think I get it now!” -- only of course, he didn’t. It was truly hilarious. He even looked the part: tall, awkward and gangly, but with a sweet, harmless quality. He wasn’t out to harm anyone, mainly because he wasn’t clever enough to conceive of doing such a thing. He was too busy just trying to comprehend the basics of what was happening around him.
Abigail McKern’s Maria was one of the outstanding performances of the show. She was that irresistible person, full of life and laughter, always with some idea. People followed her because she was a natural leader and so thoroughly likeable. It was impossible not to get sucked into her laughing plans, and I laughed along with her and cheered her on, right up until we saw Malvolio locked up in the cell underneath the stairs. Suddenly, the air was taken out of me. What I had been laughing about the whole time was suddenly no longer funny. And somehow, I felt implicated in it because I were right there with her. Maria is a fairly sadistic character, but by making her so likeable, McKern implicated the audience in her sadism by making us laugh with her right up until they put Malvolio in jail. It was a really amazing performance. James Saxon’s Toby Belch was a good partner for her, if a lot less likeable. They made a formidable team of bullies together.
McKern could be as good a Maria as she wanted, but if she had been doing it opposite a bad Malvolio it would have been worth nothing. Richard Briers’ Malvolio was as deliciously unlikeable as any Malvolio should be, but he maintained Malvolio’s humanity as well. There was always that little voice in the back of your head feeling bad for him (just look at how crazy he is about Olivia!), but it never took over your distaste for him until he was locked up, and suddenly it burst through. The sadistic bullying went too far. Even before then, it was hard not to be uncomfortable with their treatment of him, despite his ridiculous behavior. Haven’t we all fantasized about a perfect life, and yelling at those we think deserve it? Who hasn’t wanted something so much that they twisted facts to make it true? Instead of just being a caricature, he was very much human, at the same time as he was unlikeable enough to make the audience laugh at Maria’s bullying.
If McKern gave Malvolio power by making him not pure caricature, Christopher Ravenscroft did the exact opposite with Orsino. He was entirely hilarious because he was so over the top with everything he did. Even he seemed to be aware of how silly his romanticism was. He was far more in love with the idea of unrequited love than he was with Olivia herself, and he made Viola’s affection for him understandable by his extremely tender treatment of Ceasario. Of course, he achieved this highly hilarious caricature by playing the character as utterly serious in everything he did, and never displaying even a glimmer of humor. Caroline Langrishe was a beautiful and highly dignified Olivia. Funnily enough, I couldn’t shake the feeling that she would have been an excellent match for the humorless Orsino- in her interactions with the Fool she laughed as little as he did, and they were both so charmingly irrational.
Christopher Hollis as Sebastian didn’t much look like Francis Barber, but his performance was quite good, despite the fact that his looks required a fairly high level of suspension of disbelief. He was a thoroughly decent fellow, kind to everyone, especially Antonio. Like every other character, Feste excepted, he’s extremely irrational, totally willing to go ahead and marry a woman who obviously thinks he is somebody else. Despite his short time on screen, I felt like he was very easy to connect with. Perhaps because he wasn’t hovering on the edge of tears for the entire play, I found his reaction to seeing Viola again much more moving than Viola’s response. Tim Barker was a good Antonio for him; they had good chemistry together, and because of the age difference, it came across more as a father-son relationship than a possibly more romantic interest.
Feste has always been one of my favorite Shakespearean characters, but in the only stage production I’ve seen of Twelfth Night he was played as just a senseless comedian, capering around and talking in silly voices the whole time. Anton Lesser did a much better job, making Feste, in my (biased) opinion, the most compelling character in the play. He had a dramatic stage presence in a way that made him feel like the center of every scene he was in, and his strange, bitter wisdom gave the sense of a deep, inward human being whose depths would never be discovered. Though we know little of his story or life, he’s clearly a troubled man. Branagh described him as a lonely, wandering, rather damaged jester, and Lesser certainly played Feste up to Branagh’s description. He seemed very detached from everyone else for several reasons. Firstly, he was almost entirely removed from the bullying of Malvolio, participating in it only in his brief impersonation of the Priest before he helps get Malvolio freed. Even that was clearly against his will, as Maria practically shoved the costume on him without his consent. His delivery of the line “Nay, I am for all waters!” after he takes off his disguise also shows his unwillingness to be a part of Maria’s bullying. That line is normally performed as an eager willingness to do whatever she needs him to, but Lesser, who usually spoke in a dry, drawling tone, suddenly yelled in a bitter outburst at his fury at being forced to participate in their bullying. Though he drinks with them and spends some time with them, Feste is of a fundamentally different make than the shallow tricksters. When interacting with the rest of the cast, there was nobody willing to treat him as more than the silly jester, and only Viola laughed (just once) at his jokes. He was smarter and more cynical than everyone else, and trying to be a jester in a world filled with humorless fools and sadistic bullies.
Lesser also has a beautiful tenor voice, not perhaps the voice of a trained singer, but a hauntingly gorgeous one nonetheless. Fortunately, all of his songs were also beautifully arranged, and all seemed to reflect the loneliness that was central to his personality. Pretty amazingly, his “Come Away Death” ballad was a tune written by Paul McCartney that he allowed them to use for the production. His songs made for some beautiful interludes to the action, and the melancholy arrangement of them called attention to the fact that his songs are almost uniformly not at all funny.
The text here was very lightly cut, which I appreciated. I almost always dislike any cuts that are made, and I wish every play would just be performed full text, in its proper form. The few cuts they made were mostly of asides made by Sir Toby and Co. and mostly during the scenes with the tricking of Malvolio. I didn’t feel that much was lost through them, and the scene would have definitely dragged had they left everything in.
In my opinion, this movie is worth watching for Feste alone, but a lot of the rest of it is great as well. It’s a nice balance of funny and serious, and my eleven-year-old sister enjoyed watching it just as much as I did. Overall, I thought it was a very worthy production, though I don’t think it’s anywhere near a “definitive” Twelfth Night (if such a thing exists) due to a fairly flat Viola and an overdone Christmas theme.
please give me subs
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