Twelfth Night (Live At Shakespeare's The Globe) (2023) -
I just don't think that I click with this one of Shakespeare's "Comedies". I've seen it before elsewhere and I find it hard to appreciate. Possibly because the jokes are obviously quite old fashioned, but with this one it also seemed that they had deliberately made it very slapstick too.
All the way through it was really quite daft and actually hard to deal with at the start, I was going to turn it off, but as it progressed and with the introduction of Sebastian (Unknown) it seemed to improve slightly and become clearer as to its direction and what was actually going on.
The eclectic mix of costume and gender muddied things slightly too. It was hard to tell who was playing which character/traditional type and while I appreciate that theatre is and should be blind, having females in a male role, when a main part of the story is about cross dressing confused things a bit too far.
The whole story could have been solved if Viola (Michelle Terry) had just asked to be sent home at the beginning and I couldn't understand why she didn't. I did think that she, at least, played the part well though.
I also quite liked Malvolio (Sophie Russell) once they really got their spotlight.
I wasn't keen on the characters of Toby Belch (Nadine Higgin), Sir Andrew Aguecheck (George Fouracres) and Feste The Fool (Victoria Elliott) or perhaps it was the delivery of their parts. Their scenes were the most crazy and seemingly inappropriate element of the play.
And Orsino (Bryan Dick) was perhaps played too straight and actually made it easy to see why Olivia (Shona Babayemi) wasn't interested in the grumpy old git. However, with that said, she wasn't exactly very cheerful either.
In general I just felt that the more modern and alternative elements cheapened it. I could appreciate that it must be difficult to keep 400 year old stories interesting, but I think that we are at a point where a really good version of the traditional style would be well received and appreciated by those of us that are fairly new to it, in order to understand the origins of it properly, before we see these other styles.
I realised that would be down to me to seek them out, but I do believe that it is a duty of the TV stations to show the variety available.
In fact I've often thought that the arts channels should have whole days dedicated to a story to explain it and explore it carefully and thoughtfully, through its various incarnations, be they stage or screen or via a book group style discussion and shown in different formats to allow us to choose our preference if at all.
I also found some of the musical choices were a bit odd too. I assumed that the fact that they all couldn't sing very well was part of the humour too? I thought that the songs were a bit too much actually and might have worked better with just one really good one at the end.
I definitely thought that I had seen better amateur productions, admittedly of other stories, but this kind of felt that it was their first night on stage and that they were still working out the kinks or even at times still in rehearsal stage. There wasn't enough energy to it or there was too much at times from certain characters.
I would avoid this story again and perhaps this production company too, but I will still always look out for Shakespearean performances, because, for the most part, Will was a writing genius.
436.82/1000.
