twelfth night
the Stratford Festival
the national post

This is Illyria, lady: a seaport and spa located, according to the new Stratford production, somewhere on the coast of India, in the days of Queen Victoria. Shakespeare's Duke Orsion is now a nabob, in emotional, and maybe even cultural, thrall to the resident English, as represented by the Lady Olivia. She comes on like an imperious Raj widow, mourning not a husband she has lost but a brother.

Leon Rubin's production of Twelfth Night is the latest instalment in his ongoing project of refreshing the Shakespeare canon by resetting the plays in exotic, usually Asian, climes. The benefits, this time, are local rather than general. They include lush, lived-in settings (by John Pennoyer) and sinuous dancing (by Keira Loughran) that makes the food of love seem spicier than ever, but they don't extend to supplying the play with a political context, probably because it can't accommodate one.

The Venice of The Merchant of Venice, even the Messina of Much Ado About Nothing (which has in the past been brilliantly staged in a British Raj setting) are comparatively realistic locations, with interacting social levels. lllyria is geographically in the Balkans, but to Shakespeare it seems to have been just a name, another in his line of shadowed Arcadias. There doesn't seem to be anything to it beyond Orsino's household and Olivia's, and though he theoretically runs the place the only tension between them is erotic. When the twins, Viola and Sebastian, are washed up on shore to wreak havoc with the local libidos, they seem to have come from nowhere. They are -- and here the production's choice of locale does have a point - - like breaths of fresh air in a hothouse.

Most of the play takes place at Olivia's place, a crowded establishment whose cross-currents are charted here with exceptional clarity. The rich texture may owe something to the geographical transplant; the set-up, as Shakespeare wrote it, is plainly Elizabethan English, so there's no great stretch in making it Victorian Colonial. It probably owes more, though, to the wit of director and actors. The chatelaine herself is played by Seana McKenna who is, to put it bluntly, older than most Olivias. (Or at least than most recent Olivias. Once upon a time, Olivia regularly used to be played by Viola's mother. How's that for overtones?)

Instead of a self-cloistered ingenue violently awakening to love, we get a worldly woman who's not as aware as she thought she was and can laugh at herself even as she totters. It doesn't necessarily make more sense to have Olivia played as a mature woman, but it's certainly a bonus to have her played by a mature actress, one as alert as McKenna to both the wit and the absurdity and as adroit as communicating both. Dana Green's Viola is an excellent foil for her, empathizing, from a distance, with her fraternal loss and then confronting her like a blast of common sense with a smile attached.

It's also easier than usual to believe that Olivia and Sir Toby Belch live in the same house and that they're actually related. They meet seldom, and he's always drunk when they do, but in these encounters they communicate an authentic blend of acceptance and distaste. Thom Marriott's Toby, someone's cashiered younger brother, is genial enough, a bully who can actually fight, but there's real calculating nastiness in him, especially in his dealings with Don Carrier's endearing Sir Andrew who, as befits his name and very much in line with the realities of the Raj, is Scottish; the yellow costume (Olivia's least favourite colour) in which he, like most Andrews, is haplessly got up is a plaid, the ancestral tartan perhaps of the clan MacAguecheek. He also plays what Toby, departing somewhat from the text, describes as "strange instruments;" they are of course bagpipes. He is the only Andrew I have seen to be permanently jealous of, and wounded by, Toby's success with Maria, who flirts with him at their first encounter and ignores him afterwards.

Diane D'Aquila is a commanding Maria, her relationship with Toby growing through each scene. Andrew Massingham's Feste is clever and melodious, though a white Indian mask (he's supposed to be the bridge between the two cultures) obscures not only his face but his personality. Brian Bedford has played Malvolio at Stratford twice before; his comic virtuosity -- when reading the fatal letter or when strutting cross-gartered -- remains intact, but it's underpinned this time by a sharp sense of class. This steward has worked his way up, and he despises those who haven't. (They return the compliment.) In specs and curlers, he exudes sniffiness. But he's serious; and when he's duped and tormented, though we don't actually feel sorry for him, we do feel. His is both the funniest performance of the evening, and the most disturbing. At least it appears to be heading in the latter direction, as does the whole production, until they both get derailed. The ultimate culprit here seems to be Sanjay Talwar's performance of Orsino, which so fastens on the character's self- pity and self-love that he comes out spineless. It becomes even harder than usual to understand what Viola sees in him. When called upon for passion in the last act, he supplies only petulance. This weightlessness infects the entire scene, so that the twins' reunion and the pairings are neither as joyous or as moving as they should be. McKenna adopts the fashionable deflationary reading of Olivia's "most wonderful" when faced with two objects of her affection.

Frankly she doesn't need it -- she has enough laughs under her belt - - but anyway she doesn't have much to deflate; journeys end in lovers' meetings, but there isn't much of an arrival.

There is a lovely autumnal staging of Feste's last song, in which the various stanzas actually apply to the people in the play, leading to a sharp reversal of fortune as between the clown and the avenging steward. It's plainly meant to chill our blood but it comes too late; we've been primed to laugh and there hasn't been enough to stop us. The production is far more successful with the play's fun than with its pain. But if you have to err on one side, the funny side's the right one.