present mirth hath present laughter
twelfth night
or
what you will
by william shakespeare
Tuesday 21 January -
Friday 7 February 2003
Upstage Theatre, Upper Hutt; Muritai School Hall, Eastbourne;
Legislative Chambers, Parliament; Salvation Army Hall, Island Bay;
Kapiti Playhouse, Paraparaumu; Martinborough Town Hall; Dannevirke
Little Theatre; The Globe, Napier; Centrestage, Taupo; New Plymouth
Little Theatre; Wanganui Repertory Theatre; Harcourt Park, Upper Hutt
If history had played out differently, this would have been the beginning of The Bacchanals' conquest of the South Island. A crazy plan to tour 30-odd South Island towns in a bus with a suitcase production of Twelfth Night was thwarted by inability to secure funding, so instead The Bacchanals undertook what was to be the first of three annual summer tours playing a full-length Shakespeare in a different North Island small town every night. If 2004's Romeo and Juliet was like The Beatles' first trip to the U.S., and 2005's A Midsummer Night's Dream was the height of Beatlemania, and the joint Midsummer Night's Dream-Measure For Measure tour of the winter of 2005 was the troublesome Let It Be period, then the young, idealistic, alcohol-hazed 2003 Twelfth Night tour was our starving, sleepless, crazy Hamburg apprenticeship. What goes on tour stays on tour, and many of the secrets of the Twelfth Night tour will go with us to our graves ...
cast:
Erica Lowe (Viola),
Eve Middleton (Olivia),
James Stewart (Sir Andrew Aguecheek),
Alex Greig (Orsino, Fabian),
John Porter (Sir Toby Belch),
Mark Cleary (Sea Captain, Malvolio, Officer),
Julia Harrison (Maria, Curio),
David Lawrence (Sebastian, Valentine),
Tina Helm (Feste, Officer),
Adam McMahon (Antonio, Priest)
Production Manager Eve Middleton;
Venue & Accommodation Liaison James Stewart;
Banner & Photography Sar Ruddenklau;
Directed by David Lawrence
Eve and I spent a lot of October 2001 watching television. We were both
virtually broke, the Trilogy was over and
Hamlet was not yet busy enough
to fully occupy us. Also, with the wind-down from finishing a post-grad
year at university, I was too exhausted to do much. One night we were
channel-hopping in the hour before
The Sopranos and, on Prime,
we stopped to watch a news segment - it was a documentary on
something-or-rather and they were in Twizel, with locals saying
"Everyone said Twizel wouldn't make it, that it was just a temporary
town, but here we are still going strong". Then they showed members
of what must have been the townswomen's guild or something in the newly
refurbished community centre. There was strange music playing and some
of the women who'd featured in the interview segments were rolling on
the floor in what looked like sleeping bags, laughing, while other women
watched them. It was obviously a performance of some kind. Cut back
to one of the women being interviewed: "Yeah, we know it's not very
good," she was saying, "but no theatre groups or anything like that
ever come anywhere near Twizel, so we have to create our own
entertainment. It's good for a laugh."
A few hours (and a few bottles of wine) later, Eve said to me
during a quiet moment, "Do you know what we should do?" I chuckled,
knowing that she'd obviously watched the documentary thinking the same
thing as me. "Tour a show to Twizel?" I said, and Eve agreed. As the
night continued, I mulled plans over in my head in between drinking
wine and stroking the cat. Each ad break, we would speak what we were
thinking out loud, and in no time at all we'd agreed that we should,
at the start of 2003, go to as many South Island small towns as possible
with a production of Twelfth Night.
Obviously our strengths were in the classics, so it'd have to be a
Shakespeare, and if you're touring you want something easy to perform
and popular. The idea was to go to the most obscure, theatre-less
places in the country and provide them with exposure to live
performance. We'd go on a bus, take ten actors and devise a show that
could be performed anywhere - large spaces, small spaces, indoors,
outdoors, wherever. We'd camp and rely on the hospitality of locals.
Several Bacchanals had family down south who (apart from James' parents,
who'd flown up for the Trilogy and would do so again for
Hamlet) hadn't had the
opportunity to see us at work but wanted to. We took a map of NZ
down off the wall and made a list of places we wanted to go. With
Hamlet and
Crave in the pipeline, the
plans were only vague to begin with, and we knew we had a while to
think about organizing it all. We mentioned the idea to a few folk,
especially Erica, who I knew had to play Viola, but left it on the
backburner while we got Hamlet
organized. We would call the tour, we decided,
Twelfth Night in Twizel (or)
Shakespeare in the South (or) Bacchanals on a bus.
It's taken me a long time to realize just how brilliant a play
Twelfth Night is. As his
final comedy, it was written at a point where Shakespeare knew the
genre inside out and it was really his supreme achievement. After
Twelfth Night, he had nothing
more to say about comedy, just as
Henry V is such a great play
that it closed the lid on history plays for him as well. I had,
however, little patience for the play at school and hadn't enjoyed
any of the productions of it I'd seen. But with it being David
Carnegie (associate professor of Theatre at Victoria University)'s
favourite Shakespeare I came across it in virtually every paper of
his I took at varsity and he continually attempted to enthuse me
about it. The first time I saw Trevor Nunn's film I fidgeted
through it, thinking "This isn't
funny!" I am
sometimes a bit straightforward in my thinking - I like my tragedies
tragic and my comedies comic. I longed to see a production of
Twelfth Night done as an
episode of the Elizabethan series of
Blackadder.
It wasn't until I was living in the UK that I began to fall in love
with this magnificent play. It was upon reading Park Honan's
biography of Shakespeare - one of the best, I think, since it's
written by a biographer and historian rather than a Shakespeare
fanatic determined to uphold his/her own theories - that I began,
for the first time, connecting events through Shakespeare's personal
life to the plays he was writing. For instance,
Timon of Athens, a play about
the most popular, wealthy guy in town suddenly going broke and being
shunned by society, must be in part related to the experiences of
Shakespeare's father John, who went from being mayor of Stratford
one year to being unable to leave his house for fear of being arrested
as a debtor the next. I've always been aware also of the father-daughter
relationships in the plays - virtually every play has a significant
one - but it was the twins that really sold me on
Twelfth Night. I'd always
known Shakespeare had a twin son and daughter, and that their names
were Judith and Hamnet (named after his parents' close friends and
neighbours), and that his son Hamnet had died as a child. What I'd
never recognized was that we can trace the point in Shakespeare's
writing career when he moved into tragedy with a vengeance at around
the same time as his son died, aged 11. Not just that, but I suddenly
saw a wealth of references that suggested he was writing about something
very personal. Hamlet, named
after his son, features a drowning (Ophelia's); at the end of
The Tempest a father is
magically reunited with his supposedly drowned son; and in
Twelfth Night, that most
melancholy of comedies, a woman grieves for and then is magically
reunited with her supposedly drowned twin brother. It seems to me
impossible that Twelfth Night
is not, in part, about Shakespeare's own children. Upon realizing
this, I found my 'approach' to the play and it seemed much better
than the experience I've usually had watching
Twelfth Night - that the
Malvolio/Sir Toby/Sir Andrew plot takes over the play while the
twins plot becomes an annoying distraction from the funny bits.
The next time I saw the Nunn film I was moved greatly by the
Viola/Sebastian reunion, and it turned out (apparently) to be one
of the most moving moments in our production.
From there onwards I have increasingly admired the play and
thoroughly enjoyed being reacquainted with it through post-grad
university studies (and upon numerous re-screenings I now adore the
Trevor Nunn film). Early in 2001 I was commissioned to write a
30-minute adaptation of the play for the Stage & Screen School at
the Wellington Performing Arts Centre, where I'd been a tutor on the
daytime acting course. The Stage & Screen School was an after-school
activity and the script was to be performed by about fifteen 8-13
year olds. I wrote a first draft that contained numerous in-jokes,
Simpsons-references and some
subtle but appallingly smutty gags that I was sure I'd be asked to
remove. To my surprise the first draft was accepted, I was paid and
the next I heard of the show was being invited to see the final
performance of it. It's the first time I've understood completely
what it must be like for a writer to witness their own work in
performance and why so many writers direct their own shows. Running
gags were completely altered, thus losing some of the crucial
references, Viola's name was mispronounced the whole way through
and I saw horrified looks on the adults' faces in the audience when
they realized just what they'd been laughing at in some of the
subtle smutty moments. What I
did think, sitting
there in terror, was what a great play
Twelfth Night is and how
much more amiable I'd be towards the idea of ever staging it.
After Hamlet, we began
organizing it properly. We had 33 towns on the itinerary and would be
away for 5 weeks. We would pay ourselves $250 each per week. As we
prepared the proposal for Creative New Zealand, we made tentative
bookings for venues and gathered letters of support from each town or
area to say how welcome we would be there and how important they felt
our visit would be to the community. We estimated that, to do it
properly, we'd need about $38,000. We asked CNZ for half this sum and
set out to raise the rest through corporate sponsorship. I was not
really expecting CNZ to fund us - with
Twelfth Night not being a new NZ
work, and none of us having been on
Shortland Street, our chances of
them being prepared to spend money on us were minimal. I knew that if
they gave us anything, it would be merely a top-up to the corporate
sponsorship I was confident the project would attract. I don't know
exactly how many proposals were sent out but it was a shitload. Day
after day my mailbox was crammed with letters from banks, car dealers,
oil companies, soft drink companies, chocolate companies, computer
companies, companies of every kind with money to burn, all of whom
said "No thanks, it doesn't really fit in with what we're interested
in supporting". The only groups interested were Whitakers, who gave us
a lot of chocolate, and Red Bull, who gave us several crates of energy
drink. And lo and behold, CNZ finally sent out the letter in October
to say they wouldn't be giving us anything either.
It was with a heavy heart that we had an Emergency General
Meeting of The Bacchanals, one Sunday night at Rialto, late in October,
to discuss the options. From the outset we've always worked on the
premise that, once we're settled we're doing something, we do it
regardless of the obstacles or pitfalls or finer details - but the
reality was that the project could not happen in the way we'd conceived
without money. I no longer had any faith in our ability to come up with
corporate sponsorship (although I still to this day believe the money is
there - I just don't have the necessary expertise/imagination/patience
to find it), even though if we shortened the length of the tour we needed
less money. Our options included a shorter tour, reduced pay (otherwise
known as doing it for free) or not going at all - basically, however we
tried to rethink it, we were still faced with the expense of crossing
the Cook Strait. We had already begun rehearsing the play and, to
my surprise, the general feeling was by this stage that people were
actually keener to do the play than the tour, even though the play
was originally geared specifically for the tour rather than choosing
something we all desperately wanted to do. So we settled on a new
idea, and one that would cost us virtually no money upfront - a few
Wellington shows, and we'd use the box office take from those to then
travel to a few venues up North. We'd camp (always part of the original
plan), travel by car (no one would hire/loan/sponsor us a bus, and we'd
discovered that it takes a ridiculously long time to get an HT licence)
and still get to experience the touring thing, albeit on a smaller scale.
Problem supposedly solved, but we still needed a bit of cash
to get the publicity beast rolling, and as Christmas and the New Year
approached, pub charities and trusts were taking an impossibly long
time to get back to us regarding other funding avenues. Early in
December, James, Eve and I spent a crazy two days on the road checking
out all the possible venues. The idea had been that by that stage we'd
have printed posters and flyers to be able to distribute in each place,
but we were still broke and could barely run to an A4 bit of paper
warning people we'd be back in the new year. In Martinborough we had
the option of a little function room or the Town Hall - the Town Hall
looked magnificent and was cheap, so we went with that just for the
opportunity to play on such a huge stage. I'd always liked the look
of the theatre across the road from the railway tracks in Dannevirke
whenever the Bay Express had paused there en route to Hastings/Napier.
In Napier we had several options and we decided to go with The Globe,
a café/gallery space in the centre of town - we liked the name
and were made to feel a lot more welcome there than the local theatre
groups had made us when we'd inspected their venues. We chose Taupo
merely as a good holiday spot and weren't realistically expecting to be
able to pack out the local amateur venue, which was a wee way out of
the centre of town. That night we sat in the thermal baths discussing
the logistics not just of the tour but of our STAB submission to
Bats (but that's another story ending with
The Bacchae) and the general
future of The Bacchanals. We had trouble in New Plymouth getting to
look at any venues and ended up going with one right in the middle
of town rather than the one we'd initially booked, and were feeling
pretty fatigued once we got to Wanganui.
Organizing Wellington venues was somewhat easier. We thought a
show in the Hutt Valley would be nice and pretty much the first venue we
looked at - a 60-seater in Upper Hutt called Upstage, was perfect and
we booked it. James had contacted John Marwick of the Butterfly Creek
Theatre company, an Eastbourne group who'd been doing Shakespeare
excerpts in John's backyard before moving on to full length productions.
Far from feeling like we were treading on their toes, the Butterfly
Creek people couldn't have been lovelier to us, and John spent a day
showing us around every church hall, school hall, community centre and
feasible space in the area. We ended up going with their regular venue,
the Muritai School Hall, initially because it had a trap door (which we
were keen to put Mark in for Malvolio 's dark house scene). We also
booked the Kapiti Playhouse in Paraparaumu and, fortuitously, our
intended Porirua venue fell through and we were able to take up Jean
Betts' suggestion of the Island Bay Salvation Army Hall.
Tradition has it that
Twelfth Night was written for
court, and the first recorded performance of the play was at Middle
Temple. We thought it would be nice to have somewhere relatively
flash for our main Wellington performance and the idea of Parliament
came up. My godmother has been Jonathan Hunt's secretary for many
years now and I put in a call to her at the Speaker's office to see
if there might be any space in Parliament we could use to perform in.
"The old Legislative Council Chambers would be perfect," she said,
"but you'd need an MP to sponsor your being there - to host the event,
as such." In the background Jonathan asked, "What play are they doing?"
and when she said, "Twelfth Night"
he said, "Or What You Will?
I'll host it!"
Casting the play was a very easy task. There was no question
that Erica would play Viola, Eve would play Olivia or that James would
play Sir Andrew Aguecheek. I could see both John and Mark in the roles
of Malvolio and Sir Toby. Mark, who knew the play, immediately
wanted Malvolio and John was happy to accept whatever he was given
if it meant not having to read the play beforehand to decide on a
part. When he was told Sir Toby Belch spent the whole play drinking
and playing practical jokes, he was happy - until he rented the Trevor
Nunn film and realized Mark had a potentially better part than he did!
Tina would play Feste - a part she probably wasn't thrilled with but
one that gave her ample opportunity to show off her singing voice.
And after Crave, which she'd
invested a lot in emotionally, she was pleased to be doing something
a little less serious. Alex, I had decided, would play both Orsino
and Fabian. I didn't know how but when I looked at it on paper, it
seemed like the two parts would be an easy double. It wasn't until
we had the first readthrough that I realized that Fabian's first
entrance is a mere seven words after Orsino leaves the stage in
II.iv - and that was the most leisurely costume change Alex would
have in the show. More of that anon! Adam would play Antonio, which
left me as Sebastian. I knew with the tour that, to economize as
much as possible, I'd need to be in the show, and Sebastian - a
generally overlooked and thankless role - had little stage time
and wouldn't tax me. Plus, I looked about as similar to Erica as
we were likely to get. The new Bacchanal this time around was
Julia Harrison. When Julia had auditioned for me for the play I
leave off my directing CV (the one which comes in between
Hamlet and
Crave) I had recognized
her from a performance piece a few years back at the Sheila Winn
festival - she'd done a chunk of Constance from
King John that I'd
remembered clearly, for some strange reason. She had since been
to the UK and Europe and done an internship at the Globe, but had
come back to NZ fed up with theatre and this was her final stab
at it - to try and discover once and for all if she wanted to
continue doing it, or thought it was a load of self-indulgent shite.
I loved working with her on the Show That Shall Not Be Named
because she was already suffering the same disillusionment with
theatre as me and knew that you could work on plays where things
were fun, simple, straightforward and painless (ironically they
weren't on that show, though). I knew her attitude would be a
great asset to The Bacchanals - plus she'd be about as far away
from the boring, matronly Marias we're all used to as it would be
possible to get.
Rehearsals were a mixture of joy and frustration. Regardless
of the outcome of the emergency meeting, it now appeared that there
were a few people who had strongly felt that if we weren't going
down South there was no point in proceeding with the play - but I
guess at the time they felt they should respect the majority decision
rather than say what they really felt. Also, the toil of yet again
rehearsing a show with no cash up front was frustrating for some,
even though they'd have been doing nothing with their time otherwise.
Furthermore, Erica's win at the Chapman Tripps, which I'd thought would
have everyone united in victory - finally we'd been able to break out
of merely being mentioned in reviewers' end-of-year round-ups of their
favourite shows of the year - instead seemed to produce resentment from
people who felt, perhaps justifiably, that they'd worked just as hard
on Hamlet as she had and were
just as deserving of nominations (what everyone overlooked was that
Erica had done a lot of high profile stuff through 2002, much of it
more prominent than her work with us - so in a way the judges were
giving us a nod in nominating her for
Hamlet rather than any of
her other shows that year). We did a runthrough just before Christmas,
with everyone due to leave for their holidays the next day, and it
was pretty disheartening. The first couple of acts were very good
but from the middle of the play onwards things fell apart. What was
ironic about this was I'd actually achieved what I set out to in
places - that, for once, the Viola/Orsino/Olivia/Sebastian scenes
were strong and in no danger of being overshadowed by the comic subplot.
Breakthroughs came at a very late stage in January. The
advantage of us all having worked together so long by this stage was
that I didn't have to spare feelings - I remember a sense of elation
after being able to stop a run halfway through and say "Sorry, I can
see this is going to be shit today and a waste of our time and energy,
so I'd rather we just quit now and attack it fresh at the next
rehearsal," something I'd wanted to do so many times during those
miserable Trilogy rehearsals. And the very next night we finally
cracked the impossible section in the third act where everybody is
on stage over the course of the scene. It was like the equivalent of
2000 Riders of Rohan charging down the hill to realize that we were
not headed for disaster. It was Mark who alerted me to the basis of
the problems in rehearsal - that unlike the other plays, we hadn't
approached this one with any humility; we'd begun work saying "Comedy
is easy, this play is easy, we're all so well-suited to these parts
that this'll be like shooting ducks in a barrel." Once we started
giving it the respect it deserved instead of mucking around, it
improved tenfold.
At the same time we suddenly received $2000 from one of our
pub charity applications - a far cry from the original budgeted sum
of $38,000, but it was a start and it meant we could actually afford
to do the tour - and by this I mean pay for petrol and camping -
without being entirely reliant on box office income.
I had envisaged a very simple staging for the show - we created a
large red banner with The Bacchanals' logo in the centre, which
Sar Ruddenklau went to a lot of effort to paint. We had two
floodlights and seven sets of xmas tree lights. By the end of the
tour we were experts at rigging all of this swiftly and with minimal
amounts of pain. We had one piece of furniture - a box which we
affectionately named 'Boxie' during a phase in
Crave when we were forming
bizarre attachments to inanimate objects (which began with Eve's
acquiring a stick which she christened 'Sticky' and spent several
days using to perform vital tasks such as pointing, jabbing people
and turning the television off from bed rather than getting up.
This bizarre naming phase reached its worst excesses during
The Bacchae where we were
referring to actual people in this manner - Eve would refer to the
dressmaker as Cloaky so I'd know who she was talking about. She
was mortified to see a draft version of the programme where, because
of not knowing the dressmaker's real name, I'd credited her as
Cloaky Cloakinson). Boxie had been a part of the set from the Show
That Shall Not Be Named, which ran at BATS immediately before
Crave and I decided to
hold on to it; for Crave
we painted it from its original green to a white, so as to match the
back wall. For Twelfth Night
Boxie received a coat of red so he'd match the banner. In the
Malvolio in yellow stockings-scene Eve would use Boxie to defend
herself from Mark if the venue didn't have an appropriate piano
stool or chair. Props, as always, were kept to an absolute minimum.
Rather than organizing foils for the sword-fighting, it became less
effort to just use the bamboo sticks we'd been rehearsing with, and
these doubled as the trees that Sir Toby, Sir Andrew and Fabian hide
behind in II.v. And for making swift entrances and exits easier, we
employed, with one exception, the in-door/out-door policy we'd used in
The Jew of Malta.
I was ultimately very happy with the music for the show - as always,
I'd have liked many more instruments and musicians, but was happy with
what we ended up with. I'd had a 50s-style arrangement for Feste's
"O Mistress Mine" in my head for a while, and the arrangement we used
for "The Rain It Raineth Every Day", the finale, is one that I came up
with, based loosely around The Beatles' "All Together Now" (on the
Yellow Submarine soundtrack),
when I was 17. Tina and I worked out all the other little Feste bits
- "I am gone sir and anon sir" - together in much the same way we had
Ophelia's songs in Hamlet.
But the piece I was really proud of was "Come, come away death",
which came to me at a moment when I didn't have a copy of the play
handy, which is why ours became "Come away death" rather than "Come,
come away" - I composed it with not quite the right lyrics in my head
and wasn't prepared to alter the tune when I realized I was missing
one word! Initially I made everyone learn all the songs as a warm-up
exercise, but I loved the sound of "Come away death" with a full vocal
arrangement so much that it seemed a shame to have only Tina sing
it in the show, so we decided to open the show with the full company
singing it, initially unaccompanied but then with guitar creeping
in as Orsino's court emerged from within the actors. In every venue -
with the exception of the outdoor show we did at the end of the run -
we entered from the back of the auditorium so that we could come
through the audience singing and then make our way onstage. It was
a great moment for focusing the group energy.
We strove for comic effect with the first line of the play - "If
music be the food of love, play on!" was delivered by Alex - and
reacted to by myself as musician and Julia and Adam as his court -
as a command to keep playing as though he's been listening to the
same song all night. I had the first swift change of the night
(in a show full of swift changes for some actors!) about 10 lines
into the play. Alex as Orsino would say "Enough, no more!" and I
would leave the stage though the out-door and return moments later
as Valentine. Even when we weren't performing in spaces like we
did for the final outdoor show at Harcourt Park, where the stage
was the size of a rugby field, this change was like running a
marathon. Most performances I'd be so pleased that I made it
back on in time that I'd usually drop or rip my important prop letter.
It was, I recall, quite late in the day that Mark, playing the Sea
Captain, agreed to drop the pirate voice he had adopted for I.ii -
initially, doubtless at my request, he had modelled the character
on the Sea Captain from The
Simpsons but once we got James and Tina in as sailors,
the "Arrrr!"s got a bit ridiculous. In I.iii James developed an
incredibly spastic set of dance moves for Sir Andrew, although we
changed the tone of the character - and this scene - numerous
times before settling on how we wanted to play it.
Erica's portrayal of Viola was great for a number of reasons.
From the outset we had talked about how to make Viola and
Sebastian similar and we were going to try mirroring exercises
and attempt to develop some specific Viola-Sebastian mannerisms
and moves...but I never found the time, having the whole play to
think about, and to my amazement Erica decided she'd just copy my
physicality and walk, right down to my dreadful posture. It was
pretty late in the day that I realized what she'd done - probably
not until she started complaining about having all the same aches
and pains I suffer from as a result of continual hunching and carrying
all your stress in your shoulders. For costumes, we used the two
suits I'd worn as Bassianus in
Titus Andronicus - I had two
second hand pinstripe suits of an identical cut, one blue and one
grey, and had rotated them through
Titus for cleaning purposes
(each night they got soaked in blood). In
Twelfth Night Erica wore
the grey for Viola and I the blue for Sebastian.
I.v was a long and complex scene, introducing the last of the
important characters bar Antonio and Sebastian. Fate had it that
the only actors available to play Olivia's gentlewomen in the scene
were myself, James and Adam. If there was one thing I greatly
enjoyed about the first half of the play it was observing so many
scenes from onstage as a bit part or mute - the Orsino/Viola scenes
as Valentine, and this scene as one of Eve's maids. James, Adam and
I would often get the giggles quite badly under our see-through veils.
Once the play gets into Act II you have three famous scenes in a row
and they're all great - the night-time drinking scene in which Feste
sings "O Mistress Mine" and Maria hatches the plot to gull Malvolio,
then the Orsino/Viola scene in which Feste sings "Come away death"
(my favourite scene in the play) and then finally the scene in which
Malvolio finds the forged letter that makes him believe Olivia's in
love with him. For me II.iv, the Orsino/Viola scene, is the heart
of the play and we played it absolutely straight - but what was
interesting, especially in light of my attitude that I was sick
of productions where the Sir Toby & Sir Andrew scenes upstaged the
rest of the play, was that it was actually the
audience who dictated
the tone of these scenes. After the drinking scene they wouldn't
then stop laughing when a serious moment came along.
One thing Mark and I agreed on from the outset was that our
Twelfth Night would not be
The Tragedy of Malvolio -
we were going for a comic Malvolio who deserved everything he got.
Tragic Malvolios are all the fashion and, I'm sure, a great meal
for an actor, but there is enough in the text to suggest the opposite
interpretation. We worked hard to play up every moment where Malvolio
causes offence or is condescending - the put-downs of Feste in I.v,
of Sir Andrew. Mark would grab Maria and twist her ear in II.iii and
smack Sir Andrew across the head when no one was looking. When Malvolio
informs Maria that the disguised Viola insists on speaking with her
in I.v, Mark even used to yell at Eve - the idea that Malvolio keeps
up appearances but when no one's looking behaves like the true puritan
he is. The letter scene is the lynchpin of any interpretation - does
Malvolio smile at the end because he's genuinely transformed by love,
or does he smile because the letter tells him to? We decided Malvolio
is not in love with
Olivia - it's entirely the notion of higher status - and that he really
has to twist his face into that smile. Mark used to put so much
physical energy into contorting his whole face and body into the smile
that he'd be dizzy when he got off stage. Mark finally got to wear his
shiny kimono onstage in the yellow stockings scene.
I greatly enjoyed playing Sebastian in the last half of the play
- trying to completely play up the ridiculousness of a man prepared
to run off with a woman he's only just met. My favourite visual gag
in the entire show was Eve running on stage in a giant wedding dress
and saying "Blame not this haste of mine"!
The thing I will never forget about our
Twelfth Night was the doubling,
especially in the final scene. Alex had come up with a swift, minimal
change from Orsino to Fabian - he'd finish II.iv, leave the stage in
his suit as Sir Toby and Sir Andrew entered, Sir Toby saying "Come
thy ways, signor Fabian!" and Alex would re-enter immediately minus
his suit jacket but wearing a ridiculous blonde wig and a stick-on
supermarket name tag that said 'Hello my name is FABIAN'. He played
a hunching, rasping-voiced Fabian who looked and sounded like a dodgy
used car salesman. At the start of V.i, Alex and Tina entered as
Fabian and Feste. They have 5 lines before Orsino enters with his
entourage. After Alex's cryptic "This is to give a dog and in
recompense desire my dog again!" line Tina would start barking
and bark him off the stage, and then bark at the audience so Alex
could chuck his jacket back on to re-enter immediately, with Erica
and Julia in tow, as Orsino, to say "Belong you to the lady Olivia,
friends?" Tina would respond "We are some of her trappings" and
then do a doubletake when she realized Fabian had vanished. Orsino
and Feste have 40 lines of wordplay, then Tina would exit to re-enter
immediately as one of the officers guarding Antonio. Mark was the
other officer. Adam, as Antonio, remained handcuffed at the back
of the stage with Mark and Tina through the whole sequence where
Olivia accuses Viola of being her husband, and when Eve yelled
"Call forth the holy father!" Adam ducked offstage - or behind
the banner - to re-enter seconds later as the priest. He delivered
the one speech the priest has, then used the furore when the wounded
Sir Andrew arrives to switch back to Antonio when no one was looking.
Tina would also slip offstage so she could enter moments later with
Sir Toby. What was glorious about all this was that after the reunion
of Viola and Sebastian, the only guard left was Mark, to whom Eve
would say "Fetch Malvolio hither!", which used to get a nice laugh.
As Feste made a lousy job of reading Malvolio's letter, Alex would
be using Erica and Julia as Viola and Curio to change behind, so
that when Olivia snatches the letter from Feste and says "Read it
you, sirrah," he
could leap out as Fabian. The laugh this got was usually nothing
compared to the one when, at the end of the letter, he leapt behind
Erica and Julia again, Eve said "Did he write this?", Tina said
"Ay madam" and then Orsino leaps out, fully attired, to say "This
suffers not much of distraction!" He had one more change back to
Fabian, to reveal the intricacies of the letter plot. Julia
during this speech would hide behind Sir Toby and Sir Andrew (who
we brought back on with Malvolio at the end) so that when Maria
was fingered as the mastermind behind the plot, suddenly Julia was
onstage as Maria.
The key to a non-tragic Malvolio for me was Olivia's "He hath been
most notoriously abused" after Malvolio's final exit. This is often
a moment of solemnity and shame for all onstage, but we went totally
the other way - largely because Malvolio actually says 'notorious'
so many times in the play that I figured Olivia
has to be mocking him.
So we had everyone roar with laughter after Tina's "the whirligig
of time brings in his revenges", then Mark would do a
Blackadder-esque "I'll be
revenged on the whole pack of you!" and exit while everyone laughed
even harder, then Eve would hush everybody and then, in the most
deadpan impersonation of Mark say "He hath been most NOTORIOUSLY
abused!", hold it for as long as possible and then we all collapsed
into a final fit of hysterics.
The great thing about the tour and the different venues was how
drastically different the show became night after night. Our
first show at Upper Hutt was quite tame - we were comfortable
in the space having had two days' rehearsal there and it was
a nice, small 60-seater; the kind of intimate space we liked.
We had a crowd of nearly 30 - not much, but plenty for us. The
next day we had the interesting task of completely transforming
the stage at the Muritai School Hall in Eastbourne into a theatre
space. Since our bookings were abysmal, we designed the space
laying out only 10 chairs (which was overly optimistic given there
were 3 bookings). The Eastbourne show was packed, hysterical and
we had a standing ovation at the end. I remember a lovely
misty-eyed moment backstage when Tina, wearing a giant anonymous
coat as one of the officers, pulled a scrap of paper from her
coat pocket and said, "What's this?" It was two pages from a New
Penguin edition of Othello,
with the Iago lines highlighted … and we realized Tina was
wearing the coat that had been part of Carey Smith's costume in
Othello. With
Twelfth Night being the
first Bacchanals show without Carey in it, it felt nice to know
that somewhere he was watching over us.
The next two nights - parliament and Island Bay - we played to huge
crowds in difficult spaces. The legislative chambers were gorgeous
but because of the unraked seating and lack of raised stage, I doubt
anyone beyond the front two rows saw a thing. The parliament show
felt more like a recital than an actual performance but the audience
were appreciative no matter how flat we felt. The next night at
Island Bay was packed with family and friends and it helped us all
being stuck in such a tiny backstage space together as we all fed
off each other's energy the whole night. The final Wellington show
at the Kapiti playhouse was to a tiny audience and under a lot more
lighting than we'd had up until that point. It was nice after such
a manic night at Island Bay to concentrate on just telling the story
and having fun again.
The Martinborough Town Hall was a glorious venue but the locals were
totally disinterested (the person who let us into the hall scoffed
when we asked if she'd be coming to see the show) and playing to 13
people in a 200-seater venue loses its charm pretty quickly. I was
also agitated at the attitude as soon as we left Wellington - there
was initially some discrepancy within the group as to whether we
were touring a show or on holiday. We needed to all be unified,
all be out on the streets trying to get people along, not lounging
around the campsites boozing. After we arrived in Dannevirke, four
hours late and with no bookings, I made the very rare move of having
a wee tantrum (I am not naturally prone to losses of temper and will
generally do anything to keep the peace) and the entire atmosphere
altered forever. The Dannevirke show, to a decent crowd, was a
great night and we had a fantastic night at the campsite afterwards.
John ended up falling asleep in the grass without actually getting
back to his tent.
We were all exhausted in Napier, where we performed at a gallery and
café called the Globe. The owner made us incredibly welcome
and that night's show was one of the best. Mark, Erica and I stayed
with Erica's uncle that night and were thus spared a night of
uncomfortable camping, although antics back at the campsite
apparently culminated in Alex causing a fire in his accommodation
(Alex refused to camp and paid out of his own pocket for cabin/caravan
accommodation after Martinborough). In Taupo NZ Post had lost all
the posters we sent ahead, so none of them had been distributed
and no one knew we were on. So we played to 13 people at Taupo
on a night that was just too hot. Gradually our focus melted, the
fairy lights actually fell off the wall and much of the last act
collapsed into giggles. But Taupo was a wonderfully relaxing place
otherwise and we spent a great hour on the beach before the show.
Eve says her happiest memory of
Twelfth Night was swimming
out into the lake and watching us all get further and further
away!! The festivities that night were huge; poor James slept
in his car because John and Mark's combined snoring was so
deafening from his tent.
New Plymouth was a bizarre, aggressive place. People kept getting
angry at us for not running our bookings through Ticketek. "People
here don't like using the internet," one woman told me accusingly,
"they want to book through Ticketek!" Given we were doing the
show for no money, camping and surviving on cask wine and
supermarket luncheon, letting exorbitant mercenaries like
Ticketek then charge us a pound of flesh for every ticket they
sold for us was not an option. We had a good show that night
and a reasonable audience but felt a lot of general hostility. A
schoolteacher said to us "I've been telling all my students to see
this, because Shakespeare NEVER comes to New Plymouth!" to which
Eve & I muttered, "Yeah, and he won't be coming back!" But the next
morning Julia's aunt cooked the entire cast a gigantic breakfast and
made us feel so welcome that we left New Plymouth thinking "Maybe we
might come back one
day?" A week later we had a fantastic review in the local paper
which implied that the audience were far from indifferent to us
and had loved every minute of the show.
Wanganui was wonderful. The repertory theatre was a beautiful venue,
the folk there made us feel so welcome, and the theatre was packed.
From the moment the show began they made us feel fantastic and we
were all on an incredible high knowing that it was the end of the
trip. All the moments of the play that needed to work their magic -
the drinking scene, the Orsino/Viola moments, the letter scene, the
Viola-Sebastian reunion - did so that night. Even the dark house
scene where Malvolio is tormented by Feste managed to be work that
night. Our partying that night was strangely subdued in many
places, although John, Eve, Tina and Julia went right through the night.
A week later we reconvened for one last performance - Paul Lambert
from the Upper Hutt city council had seen the first show and wanted
us to come back to Upper Hutt, so we did a free outdoor performance
at Harcourt Park. It was a very strange experience - the audience
all sat a fair way away from the stage, so there was none of the
intimacy that is so integral to everything we do. The stage itself
was so huge that we didn't quite know what to do with all the extra
space. And we were being amplified, which made us self-conscious
about voices. During the letter scene that ended the first half,
Eve, Erica and I snuck up around the back of the audience to watch
the scene. The stage was miles away, Mark, John, Alex and James
looked like ants but every word was loudly and clearly amplified
throughout the whole Hutt valley. I'd be impressed if anyone seeing
it had any idea what was actually going on. Once it got dark things
improved - but it was a surreal experience to come onstage for
Sebastian's soliloquy in Act IV, by which time everything bar the
stage was in total darkness, and be delivering my speeches aimlessly
into the blackness, unable to see anyone but able to
feel two hundred
people grinning at me in the dark.
A lasting memory of Twelfth Night
was from New Plymouth. We were already talking about what we'd do
better when we toured again and I was running through lists in my
head of plays that might be feasible touring vehicles -
Love's Labour's Lost, The Merry Wives
of Windsor - trying to come up with something suitable. In
between the runthrough of the last act (we always topped and tailed
the final scene in every new venue, just to ensure there were no
entrance & exit problems) and the actual performance, Eve, Julia,
Erica and I went out for dinner and discussed the bizarreness of the
whole process - that we'd ended up with no money, that we hadn't gone
to the South Island, that the rehearsals had been lousy and bickering
and that a week out from opening it had looked like
Twelfth Night would be the
most disastrous Bacchanals show of the lot. How had it somehow all
come together? Why were we faced with audiences overflowing with
appreciation and praise and enthusiasm? Why did the Dominion Post's
review say this was the best Bacchanals show of the lot? How come,
when faced with the challenge of Shakespeare, we'd managed to win
out four times in a row -
Othello, Titus, Hamlet and now
Twelfth Night? "It's because,"
I realized out loud, "these plays were
not written to be
performed by the best actors in the country with shitloads of money
behind them, getting together once a year in the country's top
theatres to do high profile performances with a cast full of stars.
They were written to be performed by a
company of people
who worked together on dozens
of shows and knew each other inside out" - and that's why I think
Twelfth Night worked: The
Bacchanals, by this stage and in this incarnation, were
so tight as a group,
as a collective, as a family, that at the end of the day we could
still produce something miraculous. As with
Hamlet and
Crave, I finished
Twelfth Night with something
of a sense of foreboding that this was the end of an era - with
Hamlet I knew we were going
into the next show minus most of the company and with
Crave we knew it would be
the last time we worked with Carey. Eve and James and I had kept
our meetings with BATS about
The Bacchae top secret,
because we didn't know a) whether we'd actually get the commission
and b) whether any of the rest of the group would be involved if we
did. With John going overseas, Mark entering the public service
and Tina becoming a full-time university student, some major
changes in the whole dynamic were afoot...
- David
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For the Twelfth Night poster we wanted a jolly party-scene image -
something emblematic and reflective of our take on the play as a whole
rather than a specific moment or specific characters. So we all got
dressed up very early in the morning and filled our glasses with ginger
ale. Unfortunately the one great photo of almost everyone was ruined by
Mark, so through the magic of computers we incorporated Mark from another
photo, which is why he looks slightly smaller than the rest of us.
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