As the man who woos Olivia from afar, Orsino usually comes off as insipid and invertebrate. How welcome, then, to find Laurence Guittard imbuing the role with solidity! Orsino's understanding lags behind his feelings, but the man does feel. Guittard gives us the melancholy, but he also gives us the passion and assertiveness (the name Orsino, after all, means "bearish"). He speaks sonorously and creates a duke of real size.
Joseph Bova plays the tippling Sir Toby broadly but effectively. At his first entrance he noisily trips on the stairs coming up from the cellar (the wine-cellar, no doubt), and spends most of the play inebriated, at one point even trying to mount Maria the servant right on the kitchen table. Mary Louise Wilson is the amusing Maria.
Steven Vinovich is for once as tall a Sir Andrew as the text indicates. With long straight blond hair he is property dim-witted, pulling out a phrase book every time someone uses a French word, and pulling out his sword only to cut his own finger.
The chief shortcoming of the production is the atrocious Malvolio perpetrated by Bob Dishy. This is a particular disappointment after the fine Malvolios that Josef Sommer and Philip Kerr acted on the same stage in 1966 and 1974. And the role of this egotistical killjoy is so important that in the 17th century the play was sometimes billed as Malvolio.
Dishy seems not to have the remotest experience with Shakespearean speech. Again and again his intonation rings false. Director Freedman is partly to blame, too, for instructing or allowing Dishy to drag everything in the classic Letter Scene beyond endurance. At first Dishy practices poses and gestures at great length. When he discovers the forged love note, he milks its contents interminably, sketching the enigmatic capital letters in the air and mouthing them repeatedly ad nauseam. And his labored attempts to achieve a smile should have stayed in vaudeville. Like Falstaff in Henry IV, Malvolio hasn't learned a thing by the end of the play, but he is not utterly stupid. Yet Dishy makes him seem more slow-witted than Sir Andrew.
Jeanne Button's costume designs are for the most part exemplary. And all the men in Orsino's household are identifiable through having shoes with bright red heels. In any game it's good to be able to tell the teams apart easily.
The second production of Twelfth Night, now playing at Brandeis, was--like its Shavian offering last summer--imported straight from the Academy Festival Theatre in the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest, and directed by Philip Minor.
The unit set designed by John Wright Stevens is a curtained belvedere that does not lend itself well to the different locations called for in the play. Most of the Brandeis stage is unused, since the set is placed so far forward. The playing area is unduly shallow and so steeply raked that it must be difficult to move about on. The cast must, to use Macbeth's words, feel "cabin'd, cribb'd, confin'd." Perhaps the Lake Forest stage is unusually small; but if so, some adjustment ought to have been made here by pushing the set back or even chucking it entirely in favor of a bare stage with movable furniture and props.
I don't much care for most of Laura Crow's eclectic costumes either. The ones for Olivia's household, post-Elizabethan but still European, are passable. But those for Orsino and his attendants are light organdy dresses that seem to have wandered out of some edition of The Arabian Nights. Is this supposed to be a reverse comment on Viola's transvestism?
Philip Minor is less lavish with music than Freedman, and less self-indulgent in overall pacing. Although Minor commendably retains more of the text, his show is still a good twenty minutes shorter than the Stratford one. He has not, unfortunately, assembled a cast that is as skilled in classical diction as Freedman's players.
Even as good an actress as Jean Marsh is not well cast as Viola. She has some fine comic bits, to be sure, but her studied performance in general lacks Redgrave's sparkle. And she scants much of the lovely verse--such as the "damask cheek" speech, which she virtually throws away.
The role of Viola, which contains a good deal of bravura, tends to overshadow the role of Olivia. But the latter is actually a much subtler part, and a harder one to do well. Yet Patricia Conolly's Olivia here is one of the three major roles in which Brandeis surpasses Startford. Conolly never loses a countess's proper carriage, nor does she violate the character's mellowness. In her first meeting with Viola, her veil is too transparent, but her timing in this scene is masterly. And on first seeing the twins together she can put a world of meaning into her exclamation, "Most wonderful." If Penny Fuller's Olivia at Startford is silver-plated, Conolly's here is pure gold.
The second superb performance is Ellis Rabb's snooty Malvolio. Rabb was, in fact, one of the best players in the AST's early years. At any rate, this is his fourth enactment of Malvolio (he has even directed Twelfth Night elsewhere), and his experience shows.
In trying to suppress the midnight carousers by saying, "Are you mad? Or what are you?," he can make the word what sound perfectly awful-similarly, in a later scene, when he brands them "shallow things." In the Letter Scene, Malvolio reads the sentence, "If this fall into thy hand, revolve." I must confess that I always enjoy seeing the actor foolishly turn around (as Rabb does), although in Shakespeare's day the word revolve meant simply consider, and had not yet taken on the modern meaning of rotate.
In the Cross-Gartered Scene, I don't understand why Rabb changes each occurrence of Jove to God. And his costumer, like the Startford one, has skimped on the cross-gartering. In proper cross-gartering, it is not enough to enclose just the kneecap; the crisscrossing should go all the way down the leg to the foot, as in the well-known 18th-century Malvolio painting by Ramberg. In the Prison Scene it is poor staging that allows us to see only Malvolio's hands sticking through a basement window. Still, Rabb's is a portrayal to cherish, right up to the series of glares he aims at one person after another when, unenlightened, he voices a final threat and departs.
The third triumph is Robert Moberly's ludicrous yet piteous Sir Andrew, whose cough cannot conceal a basically pasty-faced visage. For him plant stalks are a snare, his nose a source of itching, he skin a meal for flies and mosquitoes. Moberly is amazingly inventive; he runs the risk of submerging Anddrew in a dictionary of shtick, but succeeds in making it all work. I do not recall ever seeing any of Shakespeare's peripheral comics played more engagingly.
As Feste, Charles Levin tries hard but falls short. For one thing, he isn't much of a singel. He and his two assisting musicians (lyre, mandoline and lute) get little help from Richard Cumming's songs, though Cumming has furnished fine instrumental scene-links for horn and woodwind.
Robert Murch (Sir Toby) and Michael Tolaydo (Orsino) do little more than get through their lines, though Mary Doyle wins a few points for her Maria. Making his professional debut here is Peter Francis-James, doubling the supporting roles of Valentine and an Officer. Though these offer little opportunity, it is at least apparent that Francis-James has learned to speak quite beautifully at the Royal Academy in London, where he played Orsino. I wish he had been entrusted with the role here.
Finally, the directors of both these productions of Twelfth Night need to be told that the word exquisite is accented on the first syllable and unhospitable on the second.