The Globe on Broadway

Re-posts of what I wrote last year about Twelfth Night and Richard III, transferred to Broadway from London's Globe Theatre.

Twelfth Night. 
“Okay,” a friend of mine said the other day, presumably (rightfully) sick of my incessant excitement about Twelfth Night and Richard III, imported from the Globe to Broadway via the West End. “But really, what’s the point?”

She was referring, of course, to the conceit behind the production: all-male, traditional costumes and staging, a pre-show dressing ritual and a post-show jig. In short, likely the first attempt at a period-accurate production in New York City a good long time. And one may ask why, of course– such a thing certainly makes less sense on a Broadway stage than at the Globe, where the authenticity of the production can be mirrored by the authenticity of the theatre itself. The answer in theory is first, because the production is supposed to be incredibly good, and producers surely wouldn’t have put up the expense for a Broadway production if they didn’t think it really was; and second, because I think there is value in staging a play the way it was written to be staged, if only for the sake of experiment.

In practice, the answer turns out to be, because Shakespeare done the way it was written to be staged, with a superlatively skilled cast, in fact achieves the exact opposite of what I assume my skeptical friend was imagining: not a stodgy museum piece, but one of the liveliest, funniest, and all-around best productions of Twelfth Night I’ve seen in a very long time, if not ever.

The two poles of the play are Mark Rylance as Olivia and Samuel Barnett as Viola. Barnett’s first entrance as Viola in a dress did get a laugh, though that was more likely because he was crawling out of a trap door. Barnett is more or less the ideal male Viola, with a naturally high-pitched voice and feminine mannerisms. He embodied Viola’s self-conscious discomfort in her borrowed body so well that the multiple refractions of man-playing-woman-playing-man more or less vanished. Particularly opposite Liam Brennan’s hilarious Orsino, the blurred space between man and woman that Viola inhabits was palpable, and often very funny.

Director Tim Carroll is judicious in the darker shading which so often consumes productions of this play. Barnett’s delivery, for example, of Viola’s line “I am all the daughters of my father’s house/And all the brothers, too, and yet I know not” ended in Viola crumbling almost into tears… an opportunity that Orsino immediately seizes to finally get his hands on Cesario, something he’s been itching to do all scene, transforming what is momentarily a tender moment into a deeply and comically awkward hug and almost-kiss.

Mark Rylance’s heavily stylized performance as Olivia likewise keeps the character from the pathos that the role is capable of. I was initially skeptical of this, and of the complete lack of dignity that Olivia possesses from the moment Rylance enters, swooping in wide circles to permit a large train and to show off a ridiculous gliding walk that Olivia and occasionally Maria both employ, which makes it look like their conical dresses are somehow being dragged along on wheels rather than feet. But as this mask of hyper-stylized femininity ranges from this pseudo-dignity into giddy and ridiculously desperate love, Rylance will occasionally erupt into shouts or (more frequently) laughter, which feel so spontaneous and natural in contrast to the artifice that they are genuinely shocking and very delightful. I came to realize that this stylization was as much a trait of Olivia herself as a performance technique. Olivia and Orsino became much more of a matched pair, a duo for whom everything– from loving to mourning to commanding– is a pose to presented rather than a role to be genuinely inhabited. It made me understand the subtitle of the play in a different way. I have always taken “What You Will” in a way that makes it roughly synonymous with “As You Like It.” But Olivia and Orsino in this production brought to mind “will” in the sense of “willpower,” and “What You Will” as a reflection of the fact that Illyria is a country ruled by two people who are convinced they can mold both themselves and the world to be whatever they desire.

Though Olivia and Orsino are the most obvious examples, overall this is not a Twelfth Night in which the characters are known to us. A profound opacity encases everyone. Barnett’s Viola delivers her brief soliloquies from such depths of confusion that they cannot be revelatory. Her mind is so unknown to herself, there is no way for her to reveal it to us. Though Stephen Fry’s Malvolio is much more confidently intelligent (a refreshing change from the usual depictions of the character), even he is too “sick of self-love” to know himself truly, much less make that self known to the audience. This same intelligence rescues the ending from becoming “The Tragedy of Malvolio,” as is so in vogue. This idea of opacity may sound like shallowness, and therefore like a criticism, but it actually isn’t. The characters blindly careening about without entirely understanding what they are doing or why becomes a core aspect of the comedy of the play, and from a textual perspective, is a fascinating contrast to the plays where characters do know themselves intimately, and which are almost exclusively tragedies.

For me, the production drove home one of my devout beliefs about Shakespeare– and obviously, as a dramaturg and person obsessed with Shakespeare scholarship, I’m biased. But I believe, and I think this production proves, that the more one understands about Shakespeare, about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre and performance practice, the better able one is to translate those things into the best possible version of Shakespeare today. Obviously, I’m not saying that I think every production needs to be in period dress with all-male casts. But understanding these things– for example, the stark class differences that period dress permits, or the altered expressions of sexuality in an all-male cast– is not dramaturgical masturbation or stuffy set dressing for people who lack creativity, but an essential aspect of the text itself.

I’m intrigued to see how all of this will translate to a historical tragedy like Richard III, particularly the very different role of the women. But if nothing else, the point is to see a very talented cast approach a play with complete dedication to understanding not only the written text, but all the unspoken assumptions about performance practice upon which the text rests– to try and reveal what audiences saw and fell in love with over 400 years ago, what first made these plays the cultural forces they are now. Inundated as we are at present with deeply mediocre and poorly understood Shakespeare productions, it seems like a laudable goal to me.