TWELFTH NIGHT
Set in the remote and exotic country of Illyria, known in Shakespeare’s time as a dangerous den of piracy, Twelfth Night concerns a pair of strangers in a strange land. Viola, shipwrecked in Illyria by a storm, thinks that her twin brother Sebastian has been killed; he presumes the same of her. Dressing herself as a boy, the rather reckless Viola soon becomes a protege of Duke Orsino, who sends her to plead his case to the lady Olivia. Olivia falls for the cross-dressed Viola, and Viola finds herself falling for Orsino. Meanwhile, Olivia’s house steward Malvolio, a pretentious puritan, is made to think that Olivia has fallen for him–a prank invented by the bawdy housemaid Maria, Olivia’s drunkard cousin Sir Toby Belch, and Belch’s buddy Sir Andrew Aguecheek–and sets about wooing her in so ludicrous a way that he’s committed to a madhouse. The arrival of Sebastian–a look-alike for the male-impersonating Viola–further muddies the swamp of disguises and deceptions.
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Though the efforts of Bartlett, Hausman, and Bloomfield–collaborators in the London performance company Gloria–fail, the work of designers Richard Hudson and Scott Zielinski is the evening’s one notable success. Hudson’s set, for which Bartlett presumably must share credit, promises the insightful Twelfth Night that is never delivered: with its two raked playing areas arching in the middle and overlapping each other, it looks like a once-unified room rent asunder by an earthquake; a revolving glass door in the middle creates a makeshift entry through which people try to establish at least fleeting contact. Zielinski lights the set in sharply contrasting shades–red for Orsino’s territory on the left side of the stage and green for Olivia’s on the right–suggesting the themes of duality that permeate the script. The set also helps Bartlett create some amusing tableaux: Orsino’s court is an Edwardian men’s club whose members lounge with brandy snifters and newspapers, while Olivia’s side of the stage is a gloom-shrouded sitting room inhabited by black-veiled mourners waiting for Olivia to embrace the love that’s offered. But a few nice visual touches can’t salvage a sinking ship.
