Directions for Twelfth Night, or What You Will

Abstract

After the first dozen Twelfth Night's there are still surprises, new guises for the old masterpiece. Directors color it golden, russet, silver or white; blue for dreams, and sometimes pink; or they allow red and even purple to dominate. They can make it sound noisy as a carnival, or eager, simple or melodious, or quarrelsome like children; it can also be strained and nervous. In 1958, Peter Hall at Stratford-upon-Avon hung the stage with gauzes and contrived what The Times called a “Watteauesque light.” And critics report that a year previously, at Stratford, Ontario, Tyrone Guthrie contrasted Feste and Malvolio in “psychological terms,” allowing the final song of the “wind and the rain” to be “as plaintive and wonderful as a Jewish lament.” Two years before that, at the English Stratford, Sir John Gielgud brought “a faint chill to the air” of his production: the comics were on their best behavior in deference to a pervasive “charm”; The Observer said that the polite word for this would be “formal,” and the exact word “mechanical”; it seemed as if, during rehearsals of the last scene, Sir John had stopped the actors and commanded, “Be beautiful; be beautiful.”