Twelfth Night

First published on 26 Nov 2009. Updated on 5 Apr 2011.

At the start of the production, we find ourselves staring at a huge mound of clothes in a darkened room along with the many other supplies needed during a bushfire. The cast pile in and begin exploring the space – a television is switched on and provides information about the state of the blaze, while a tattered Collected Works of Shakespeare is found. The only female member of the cast (Andrea Demetriades) begins to weep when news comes of six firemen believed to be trapped in an inferno. An old man (Max Cullen) starts reading from the book to comfort her, and so commences the actual play. The book is discarded after a few minutes, and the cast set into their roles as if the characters were a natural extension of each of their personalities.

Once the context has been created, however, the production hits its stride.. This is a distinctly Australian Twelfth Night, with constant splicing of slang and local songs into the script: never has the word ’mate’ been said so many times in a Shakespearean production before. It’s a refreshing change, and if the bushfire framing device was the price that had to be paid to unlock these potentials then it was worth it. A rendition of ‘Throw Your Arms Around Me‘ was a particular highlight.

The actors too appeared to have tremendous fun with both the script and on-stage props – many a drab cardboard box was used to great comic effect, as well as the pile of clothes, which the actors scrambled over with glee. Ben Wood was a deliciously indignant Malvolio – his two index fingers have more charisma than any other digits in Sydney at the moment. Brent Hill let out both his inner woman and inner pirate in his roles as Maria and Antonio, his enthusiasm contagious to both his fellow actors and the audience.

There were some moments where the production sagged, though these were few and far between. Bell Shakespeare is celebrating 20 years this season, and Twelfth Night is a fitting production to celebrate the occasion. Tomas Boot

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Preview:

According to Lee Lewis, it's the big question at the heart of every Bell Shakespeare company production: how do you make it sing in a contemporary voice? "It's about the freedom to explore that - actually, the imperative to explore that," Lewis says.

No doubt about it: Lewis makes Shakespeare sing. As someone known for her energetic direction of new work (and not a lot of Shakespeare, she admits), it's been Lewis's mission to make theatre that speaks to the here and now - and her production of Shakespeare's comedy Twelfth Night does exactly that.

The play traditionally opens with a scene of revelry: merry musicians playing for the Duke in his palace. This Twelfth Night begins in darkness and eerie silence. There's a scattering of debris on stage: cardboard boxes, garbage bags, shopping trolleys, a flickering television set and, in the middle of the space, a large pile of clothes.

In the original Twelfth Night story, Viola washes up on a foreign shore, the survivor of a shipwreck that has apparently claimed the life of her brother Sebastian. Lewis has turned the shipwreck into a bushfire - so it's no accident if the powerful opening image of this production feels close to home. It's a reminder of the images that emerged in the aftermath of Black Saturday, which had a profound impact on Lewis. "I was feeling the weight of ten years of accumulated weight of disasters, manmade and natural, and the weight we were all feeling in relation to those images," she says.

"I realised - god, that's actually what this play is about. It's about hope. If you start with a disaster, somewhere in us we have to find hope. And I do believe that, during some of the hardest times that we have as a society, we go back to these plays. We look for our answers in our past. One of our mechanisms for survival is the ability to look back at what has mattered before and know that they can matter again."

Framing Twelfth Night as an examination of disaster was a bold artistic decision - Shakespeare's comedies don't often veer this close to tragedy - but Lewis firmly believed in the conceit. "You've got to ask huge leaps of the audience," she says, "but that's actually what they want."

Not to say that Lewis has stripped the play of its humour. It's still rife with Shakespeare's favourite comic devices: cross-dressing, mistaken identity and the numerous and joyous complications of love. It's just that - as for those who've lived through such events as the Victorian bushfires - the darkness is never very far away.

Lewis’s Twelfth Night opened at the Orange Civic Theatre in June and wraps up in Sydney this month, having played to audiences in 27 different venues around Australia in between. The show we see in Sydney will be slightly different to the one they saw in Orange: it’s evolved on the road, with the cast (which includes Andrea Demetriades as the resourceful Viola and Max Cullen as the clown Feste) tweaking and adapting it for each new space. “They’re an incredibly inventive group of actors – they’ve had to be for this to work,” Lewis says. Although she might not approve of every directorial decision the cast has made. “There are a couple of things I don’t necessarily agree with,” she says graciously, “but I also have to trust their performance instinct. It’s about being in a place where I have faith in the idea – and their connection to the idea as well." Darryn King