Winter theatre listings seem to feature fewer pantomimes, probably due to cultural sensitivity about sexual innuendo and satirical female cross-dressing. Their absence has encouraged multiple takes on A Christmas Carol, while the National has refashioned The Importance of Being Earnest as a dazzling grownup panto. Another option is Twelfth Night, about to open at the RSC but gazumped by the small but glorious Orange Tree.
Despite a title alluding to the end of Christmas festivities, Shakespeare’s 1602 bitter comedy of trickery and revenge isn’t narratively a December-January tale, and includes a reference to “midsummer”, but can easily be wintered. Tom Littler, artistic director at Richmond, sets it in the late 1940s, soon after a November remembrance, its characters bedecked with medals and mourning war dead.
Shakespeare is such a generous writer that Lears can be upstaged by Fools, or Othellos overshadowed by Iagos. It’s startling, though, to find Twelfth Night dominated by Feste, a minor clown only once named in the Folio text. By conflating him with the equally junior Curio, Littler makes the character central, with actor-musician Stefan Bednarczyk a master of revels, seated at a slowly revolving central piano from which he picks out storms and church bells and croons lovely settings of Feste’s half-dozen songs, while cast members encroach on his instrument. This approach is textually justified by Feste having asides to the audience, but Bednarczyk, with spoken lines matching sung, is a revelation.
The script is almost highly scored enough to qualify as a play with songs. Everyone twice harmonises about someone buying a dozen seasonal gifts for their love, although mysteriously (and anti-metrically) these presents are delivered over 12 days of “December” rather than “Christmas”. This suggests secularisation, although Bednarczyk opens and closes with an instrumental version of Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring which, at the close, beautifully transposes into Feste’s “When I was but a little tiny boy”.
It can be ungallant to mention birth dates but I do so only to hail the durability, when sympathetically staged, of great acting. Oliver Ford Davies, 85, delights as a Malvolio whose cruel duping may poignantly weaponise dementia, while Jane Asher and Clive Francis, both 78, are a beady quasi-feminist maid, Maria, and an impeccably chaotic drunkard, Sir Toby Belch, respectively. Robert Mountford’s clubbable but baffled Sir Andrew Aguecheek would be a shoo-in for safe Tory constituencies. As separated twins Viola and Sebastian, Patricia Allison and professional debutant Tyler-Jo Richardson impressively achieve a plausible gender swap. As in the National’s The Importance of Being Earnest, it is strongly suggested that, amid confusions about who is disguised as whom, no one will worry unduly about which gender they bed.
To adapt the opening lines, if this play with music be a new Christmas classic, give me excess of it.
• At Orange Tree theatre, London, until 25 January
• This article was amended on 2 December 2024 to correct a picture caption. The second image shows Patricia Allison as Viola, not as Maria.
