For those of us who favour good sightlines and acoustics, the transfer of these two productions from Shakespeare's Globe to the West End is welcome news. Both feature an all-male cast, and are directed by Tim Carroll and designed by Jenny Tiramani. Her permanent set – a decorated oak screen, with some of the audience seated in on-stage galleries – suits Twelfth Night especially, and recreates the collegiate atmosphere the play must have had when seen at the Inns of Court in 1602.
The big draw is Stephen Fry's Malvolio, and he acquits himself extremely well. He is suitably grave, dignified and overbearing. My only reservation is that Fry has such natural lordliness and is so handsomely bearded that you feel he would be a catch for any Olivia. Class revenge, which motivates the plot against the presumptuous steward, is less a factor in this version than is the idea of passion breaking through a stonewall surface. You see exactly that, to hilarious effect, in Mark Rylance's Olivia, a performance that shows the stylised movements and white face of the onnagata (female impersonator) from Japanese kabuki theatre being shattered by uncontrollable sexual desire.
In general, I am against the idea of adult males playing Shakespeare's women: it is hardly authentic, as the parts were written for teenage boys. But it does yield a very funny performance from Paul Chahidi, who turns Maria into a plumply roguish figure forever eyeing Sir Toby with lascivious enthusiasm. Carroll's production captures the labyrinthine strangeness of Shakespeare's comedy when Liam Brennan's Orsino casts surreptitiously longing glances at Johnny Flynn as his feminised pageboy, Cesario, while Feste sings of sexual desolation. With Roger Lloyd-Pack as an aristocratically woeful Aguecheek, this is a very good production that reflects the shifting, opal-like colours of Shakespeare's mysterious comedy.
Richard III was received with equal rapture, but I felt it had not grown excitingly since the Globe. There is no denying the charismatic originality of Rylance's Richard: a self-hating psychopath who conceals his inner rage behind an infantile goofiness. This leads to some extraordinary moments, as when Rylance absent-mindedly chews the fingers of his newly enthroned queen as if about to cannibalistically devour her.
What I miss, though, is any sense of the play's past or its politics. You would never guess from this production that the Richard of the preceding plays is an embattled warrior. Rylance's Richard also seems driven by an impulsive lust for killing rather than an astutely plotted assault on the English crown. It's a wittily beguiling performance but, in the end, one that transforms the play into a hypnotic star-turn.
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