The erstwhile Victor Meldrew is on fine form
Some are born to play Malvolio and some have Malvolio thrust upon them. In Richard Wilson's case, it was a bit of both. So many people told him he was born to the role of Shakespeare's great curmudgeon that when the director Gregory Doran asked him, he felt he had to say yes - even though, at 72, he considered himself too old and his own real interest, as both a director and an actor, is in new work. On Twelfth Night's opening night his brain staged a small rebellion and skipped two lines. No one noticed. They were just so thrilled to see him there.
Wilson proved soon enough that he was born to the part: wringing all the possible laughs out of the letter scene, using his hands to turn up his mouth into a smile, performing a show-stopping double-take in his subsequent dishabille (not only cross-gartered but boxer- shorted), and bringing pathos to his incarceration in the loony bin. As with all the great Malvolios, by the end you agree he has been monstrously abused. When he leaves the stage, he forces his face into a grimace once more and announces his revenge from beyond it. It crosses your mind that he has finally gone insane.
But Twelfth Night is more than Malvolio, though you wouldn't think it from the attention Derek Jacobi and now Wilson have received recently. It is a play - more so even than A Midsummer Night's Dream - in which romantic comedy vies with farce on the one hand and gloom on the other. The farceurs in this production are of variable merit. I liked James Fleet's overconfident yet whimsical Andrew Aguecheek. "I was adored once, too" was followed by the frozen expression of a knight trying to remember exactly when. Richard McCabe's too young, too vile Toby Belch was less effective, and his farting (I thought he was meant to be a belcher) very quickly became too much of a good thing.
The romance players have the harder job and not all pulled it off. Jo Stone-Fewings was a beautifully voiced Orsino, using music not so much to feed his love but as a sedative to calm these "hectic and giddy-paced times", and more specifically his heart. Alexandra Gilbreath is a wonderful Olivia, object of his affection, censorious, fanciful, grand, yet empathetic. Her moods swing. She violently scolds Belch and then turns, suddenly all charm, to chat up Sebastian. A big laugh for that.
If anything, Gilbreath is too good, because she outclasses Nancy Carroll as Viola. Done up as a principal boy and looking permanently worried, she reminded me a little too much of Julie Andrews. Viola and Olivia are meant to be mirror images of each other. Both have lost (or think they have lost) their brothers, both suffer from unrequited love and both find themselves embroiled in the manic tomfoolery of the lowlifes. They are, just about, each other's anagrams. Their verbal jousts should indicate this equality, but here they lack cut and thrust.
The staging is beautiful, however, showing off Illyria as an Ottoman kingdom: a court of eunuchs, lyre players and sybarite bathing houses. The priests are done up in black like Archbishop Makarios. Into this alien empire, Viola and Sebastian crash like aristocrats whose Grand Tour has taken a wrong turning. Malvolio's letter scene is delivered before Belch, Fabian and Aguecheek as they hide in a bush, standing on its trunk several feet above the stage. At Malvolio's presumptive arrogance, it sheds its leaves, as if those hiding were tearing their hair out in exasperation.
Feste is brilliantly done by the short, dark and handsome Miltos Yerolemou, who plays him as a deeply pessimistic fool who keeps a weather eye out for the absurd - mainly through force of professional habit. Thanked by Orsino for his pains in singing the especially gloomy "Come away, come away death", he merrily replies: "No pains, sir; I take pleasure in singing." More than anyone in this uneven yet spirited production, Yerolemou captures the bitter-sweet nonsense of Twelfth Night.
“Twelfth Night" is at the RSC, Stratford-upon-Avon, to 21 November and then in London Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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