Twelfth Night and a Modest proposal
I’ve rarely experienced such contrasting theatre events, both admirable in their own ways, as I did yesterday at the Unicorn in the afternoon and the Young Vic in the evening.
The first was a stripped down, but fully alive, production of Twelfth Night for a young audience, with one actor playing Viola and Sebastian, to very good effect, for the sole sacrifice of the big laugh on Olivia’s “most wonderful” exclamation.
The second was the astonishing production by Daniel Kramer, designed by Richard Hudson, of Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures from an Exhibition, the first time this musical piece has ever been staged as either dance or theatre or, as in this instance, both.
If music is the food of love in the Shakespeare play, it’s the stuff of nightmares in the Young Vic event, where that great climactic, pealing rendition of the Gates of Kiev becomes a work-out for miserable sexual athletes slapping each other about and Mussorgsky’s alcoholic sexual duality is represented by a hermaphrodite with a vodka bottle for a penis.
Strange how both productions boiled down in essence to sex, drink and loneliness, but of course the genius of Shakespeare ensures that there is mystery and beauty, too, in all the extremes of human experience and longing.
The Unicorn has been reconfigured “in the round” and a lovely design had us sitting around a sunken pool, a tufted lawn with a little bank of wild flowers, potted violets (and violas?), and that surefire pleasure-giver, a large descendent tree lit lovingly throughout the action.
There were two large parties at the matinee. One was from Stockwell Primary; the ten year-olds were beautifully behaved, and indeed enchanted by the play. The second was a large group of rather bolshie Dutch teenagers who had somehow found their way, with their teachers, almost by accident, to the Unicorn. They’d all had lunch, ,too, in the Unicorn deli-cafe.
I think we lost the line about Aguecheek sailing into the north of my lady’s favour where he will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard; they certainly did, anyway. They were noisy, disruptive and constantly chattering.
But the actors stuck with it, and as the show continued, the noise abated and the magic began to weave its spell. There was also some expert, unobtrusive ushering by the Unicorn staff, so that the whole situation was well under control.
But in the interval, the whole crowd of them just disappeared into the bustle outside. Apparently half wanted to stay, half to leave and the teachers decided on discretion as the better part of valour.
Shame. We missed them badly in the second half and the performance was diminished by having less of an audience to try and tame.
There was no comparable audience uproar at the Young Vic, though one puritanical super-senior citizen — the ubiquitous Blanche Marvin – tut-tutted very loudly and disapprovingly when a chap disported himself with a baby’s bottle as a penis and a few more of them bared their buttocks in Peter Mumford’s exquisite lighting.
Otherwise, we were a perfectly well-mannered audience submitting to a nightmare blast of music, dance and some defly inflected poetic writing by James Fenton as poor old Modest banged about inside his own alcoholic misery.
I doubt if we’ll see a more extarordinary production all year than this collaboration between the Young Vic and Sadler’s Wells, and my initial disappointment at having the orchestrated music filtered through a sound system was soon forgotten in the brilliant live incursions of a pianist playing the original piano suite and in arrangements that not many of us would have recognised.
It was a far cry from the charming a capello items in the Unicorn Twelfth Night, but no worse, and probably a great deal better, for that. Music can soothe the savage breast, but it can also rouse the savage beast. It will be fascinating to see what the mixed crowd of dance and music critics make of it all.