Twelfth Night

As with most Shakespearian comedies, the plot is deeply implausible. However, the excellent Cornish locations at St Michael's Mount & Lanhyrock give a good sense of place and the winter setting (apart from the scene of apple picking!) comes across well - it really does look like an English winter, rather than a picture postcard snow-scene.

The play is cut down to a manageable length without losing the sense of it, The broad comedy aspects (Toby Belch et al) are thankfully limited.

The acting is well done by a cast of British stalwarts. Amazingly, Viola and Sebastian actually do look broadly alike.

This film is best viewed as an amusing light romantic comedy rather than a side-splitter.

Reading other reviews of 'Twelfth Night' it is interesting to see that some people think it is a slow film and others quite fast. It gripped me from the opening gust of rain on a dark night to Feste dancing off into the sunset. Grappling with Shakespeare is a perilous activity but I thought Trevor Nunn brought out the comedy and the emotions of the story well. It is a film to make you smile at the follies of mankind but also their charm.

Ben Kingsley is amazing. I've never seen Feste played that way but it seemed perfect. Imogen Stubbs does the comedy and the drama equally well. The scene with Orsino in the bathtub is a stock one but she does it beautifully, balancing the humour of the situation with the tenderness and the longing. Imelda Staunton brings unusual depth to the character of Maria. The rest of the cast are great too.

The text of the play is changed around but not unnaturally so. The scene that cuts between Feste's song and Viola/Cesario and Orsino playing cards is wonderful, taking in eight of the characters and telling you more about them. The last act of the play is difficult to stage well but Nunn gives it a good shot.

The Cornwall setting is lovely, the radiant sunshine, the green leaves and fine buildings are captured gorgeously by the cameras. I also liked the music very much and find some of the tunes quite hummable.

Very enjoyable and worth seeing again and again.

Slick Shakespeare adaptation, well acted and very humorous (in parts) in its telling. Naturally, there's always going to be some differences from stage to cinema. The film took advantage of this, of course, to avoid a "stage" feel. The perceptions, or rather the misperceptions, of people and motivations are well explored and portrayed. Ben Kingsley is a standout, for his interesting twist on the character Feste. In short, a good adaptation and film. Recommended.

Trevor Nunn's beautifully photographed and acted, deftly written film is one of the most enjoyable adaptations of a Shakespeare play ever made. Helena Bonham Carter is pitch perfect as the beautiful Olivia, who in "deep mourning" for her dead brother, falls in love with Cesario (who happens to be a woman named Viola dressed up as a man, wonderfully played by Imogen Stubbs, the only actress I've ever seen able to create both a charming Viola and a totally believable Cesario), meanwhile Viola falls for the Duke of fictional Illyria (the exquisite Toby Stephens) who is desperately in love with the Lady Olivia. Meanwhile, Viola's lost twin brother (Steven Mackintosh of "Gentlemen Don't Eat Poets", excellent again here) winds up in Illyria and adds to the confusion. Wonderful, layered support comes from Ben Kingsley playing Feste, Olivia's fool. The only flaw, perhaps, is the few minutes before the conclusion when everything seems to be coated with a thick gloss of sugar; the film comes through this unscathed. Trevor Nunn comes through with an exquisite Shakespeare film adaptation (which is a do or die task). A great showcase for the heavenly cast featuring some of the best performances ever by Bonham Carter (save "Wings of the Dove"), Kingsley (in his best supporting turn ever), novice Stubbs, and Stephens. A very worthwhile effort. Rent it, you won't be let down.

In writing Twelfth Night (and the same goes for many other of his romantic comedies), Shakespeare showed that he was not only a genius at dark tragedy but also at light comedy. I saw a junior college production of this play which did live up to Shakespeare's intentions, which was in fact so funny I was falling off my chair.

Unfortunately, director Nunn will not allow a hilarious slapstick comedy to just be a hilarious slapstick comedy. Apparently he succumbed to the notion that everything Shakespearean has somehow to seem profound, which in this case results in an attempt to transfer this light, sparkling comedy, full of deliberately overdrawn characters and silly lines and pratfalls, into a brooding tragedy in which pompous ass Malvolio acts as if he were, or imagined himself to be, Hamlet caught in the wrong play, while clown Feste is misanthropic to the point of sadism. There is no suggestion of comic timing anywhere in this film!

It appears that once Nunn decided to insist on a modern-dress version, he adopted as his mentor the let's-portray-the-messed-up-dysfunctional-household school. This is stupid. A better mentor would have been a closer modern equivalent of what Shakespeare was doing in this play. Something like I Love Lucy or Amos 'n' Andy or The Honeymooners, in other words.

One thing that entirely puzzles me is: why the devil didn't Nunn exploit the particular advantages of the cinema in depicting this gender-bender story of a girl impersonating a look-alike boy? Why in sam hill didn't Nunn have a male actor who is skilled at female impersonation, or an actress skilled at impersonating males, play both roles on a split screen? (See, for the sort of impersonation I refer to, Vanessa Redgrave as the trans-sexual tennis player in Second Serve.) In other words: Why transform a stage play into a film at all, if you're not going to put the advantages of the cinema, as opposed to those of the stage, to work? Nunn's treatment of this play is not only a mangled interpretation, it's unimaginative.

Ben Kingsley is the only performer who does very much with his part, and what he does he does very well. His acting creates a very interesting character, and his interpretation of Feste is certainly consistent, but it receives no support whatsoever from the text.