Twelfth Night: A Review

Twelfth Night is Shakespeare’s last pure comedy, a festival of irrational exuberance, sly self-parody, and wry wisdom.

All the familiar Shakespearian personalities are present – the cross-dressed heroine, the witty jester, the effete aristocrats, drunken clowns, and opportunistic servants.

Twelfth Night has no Falstaff or Rosalind to dazzle us with individual brilliance.

But the play’s masterful totality, and the sweet sadness behind its humor, make it one of Shakespeare’s best.

Seacoast Repertory, however, has come up with a version that looks and sounds almost amateurish..

Perhaps because it was built to tour to schools, it’s been cut, compressed, cast and staged with little but efficiency in mind.

It looks low-budget and plays that way, too, and its languid energy level is all but fatal, especially in Shakespeare.

John McCluggage’s direction appears indifferent at times

He makes little effort, for example, to distinguish Twelfth Night’s several locations, inviting confusion as to what is taking place where on Michael Minehan’s generic unit set.

McCluggage’s staging, including the contrived duel near the play’s climax, and the famous letter-overhearing scene and the contrived duel near the play’s climax, is often hastily unimaginative.

That old device of hiding behind a hand held bouquet of leaves lost its freshness some time ago.

Worst of all, director McCluggage decided to double up his actors in several of the play’s most critical male roles.

It’s a choice that may have saved the Rep some money, but severely damages the play.

Dan Beaulieu is the chief victim of McCluggage’s casting economy.

Thrust simultaneously into the major roles of the fantasticly romantic Count Orsino and the bibulous lecher Sir Toby Belch, Beaulieu fails to make either character credible.

In period roles as flamboyant as these, his brand of contemporary ironic detachment makes him look like a man playing hockey with a tennis racket.

The equipment’s all wrong for the game.

CJ Lewis fares only slightly better in his dual roles.

He’s more or less effective as the mildly homo-erotic sea captain Antonio.

But his version of Feste, Shakespeare’s most enigmatic Fool, is dragged into one-dimensional cliché with unnecessary mugging and a Gomer Pyle speech pattern that’s equally gratuitous.

Lewis does the best he can with Feste’s magnificent songs, but his thinly plaintive singing and Craig Faulkner’s 60s folk musical arrangements only highlight the production’s stylistic schizophrenia.

Low energy, misreading, lack of command, and one-dimensionality afflict most of the rest of the cast.

Their characterizations largely ignore Shakespeare’s supreme command of human complexity by reducing everything to a barren quest for cheap laughs.

Twelfth Night is many things, but an aimless, enervated sitcom isn’t one of them.

Twelfth Night will play at the company’s Bow Street Theatre through October 19th.

For NHPR News, I’m Kevin Gardner.