Twelfth Night

Belvoir’s new production of Twelfth Night may be studded with Sydney stars but it takes a while to get off the floor.  On Michael Hankin’s bare stage, with walls brightly splashed in  modernist colours, it’s hard to know where are and why we are here. 

The actors, while virtuosic as character comedians, seem at first to be in different plays – despite Stephen Curtis dressing all in late Renaissance period.

The courtly antics of Orsino (Damien Ryan), who sends Viola (Nikki Shiels), disguised in pants, to woo Olivia (Anita Hegh) for him, are subsumed by the rowdy funny business of those in Olivia’s household. 

There’s lots of silliness from a mumbling, drunken Sir Toby (John Howard), from Anthony Phelan’s glorious knock-kneed fop, Aguecheek, and from a pantomime droll Feste by wheelchair-bound Keith Robinson, making a welcome stage return after years of illness.  And Lucia Mastrantone as Olivia’s spirited maid.  

But director Eamon Flack just lets them and other smaller roles all rip, with seeming little thought for balance, clarity of language and lapses of truth.

Well may Malvolio complain at this excess.  Here Peter Carroll truly stars as the antique Puritan out of sorts with all during this mad, love-obsessed time of Twelfth Night.  

That mood is magically phrased in the live musical interludes from composer Alan John and, by end, Flack’s production finds its verisimilitude and delivers the play’s rich mix of melancholy and joy.  But you can’t “just add actors”, as he says, and leave it all to the stars.  

Martin Portus

Photographer: Brett Boardman