“Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?” So asks seasoned pisshead and sensualist Sir Toby Belch in Act II of Twelfth Night, passionately defying the reproaches of Malvolio, perhaps the squarest austerity-monger in all of Shakespeare.
Belch’s is a passion that will succour anybody who’s ever resented pressure to abstain from pleasure, a passion that will chime with the way many, if not most, of us will feel just a few sybaritic weeks from now, at the dawning of another year, in the pallid realm of discounted gym memberships and diet blogs and commands to give up cakes and ale and heaven knows what else.
Belch’s is a passion that warms Twelfth Night, like an open fire in a midwinter room. It is for these reasons that I, along with a group of other debauched comedians, will be staging the play on 5 January 2016, the actual Twelfth Night. There is, I acknowledge, some dispute as to whether Twelfth Night falls on the fifth or the sixth but I haven’t the word limit to unpick it here. And anyway we could only get the venue on the fifth.
The idea for the production was born in the sparkling cold crucible of Twelfth Night 2013, when I watched a shabby and now forgotten TV adaptation of the play starring Frances Barber and Richard Briers. The Belch-Malvolio antagonism made flesh my new year’s angst and the film’s low-key comedic charm and dogged humour were the perfect remedy for the January blues. I’ve returned to it every Twelfth Night since.
The play suits a load of modern comedians because its concerns are so close to those of modern comedy: people sitting around and making fun of each other, drinking too much, sometimes feeling bad about it, questioning whether they should give up; people falling in love, becoming self-obsessed, acting like idiots. There’s an elaborate prank whose ultimate sadism would give even the nastiest Gen Y schadenfreude-head the chills. It has, in Feste (in the most part referred to simply as “clown”), one of the funnier and slightly less annoying Shakespearean fools. And, of course, it boasts a girl pretending to be a boy, her twin brother no less, which is always very funny.
No production of Shakespeare would be complete without a semi-arbitrary updating of the play’s setting. We’ve opted for 2015/16 and a rural New Year’s Eve getaway, attended by a bunch of discontented urbanites who don’t want the party to end. See our production and you’ll see, among myriad other things, a play about: drinking, or not drinking; about love, and how to find it; about a prank gone way too far; and – aptly, perhaps, given that it’s a charity production for Refugee Action – about people finding themselves lost in a strange land, looking for acceptance.
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Twelfth Night with Comedians for Charity … on the Actual 12th Night is on 5 January 2016 at King’s Cross theatre, London
