The illusions of love and theatre become entwined in Dan Jemmett’s delightful and crackingly funny staging of Twelfth Night, which is offered up as a failing end-of-the-pier show. It’s performed by a troupe who clearly couldn’t afford the extra actors needed to play some of the characters and don’t just have to double – which they do with a studied ineptitude that points up the absurdities of theatre – but they have also excised Maria entirely from the play and have Sir Andrew Aguecheek as a chinless wonder of a ventriloquist’s dummy operated by Sir Toby.
Jemmett is a British director based in France, best known in the UK for co-founding the experimental company Primitive Science in the early 1990s. He is clearly steeped in the traditions of vaudeville and music hall. This is a show full of bad wigs, bad teeth and even worse jokes (often about death) delivered by Feste, who also spins records on the turntable before dabbling in a little murderous stage sorcery – much to the discomfort of Malvolio, who with his white gloves not only suggests a clown or mime but also possibly a mortician too. There’s even a little moment that recalls Morecambe and Wise.
Orsino is a flashy crooner and Olivia is the troupe diva playing to men’s fantasies in a show performed in front of five beach huts, all peeling paint and weather-beaten pastels, which double as dressing rooms. This is a show suffused in both music and silence, in love and hate, the tragic and the side-splitting. When Antonio Gil Martínez’s Malvolio fantasises about taking his revenge on Sir Toby and cutting him down to size it is both horrifying and hilarious. The ambiguities and erotic possibilities of Viola’s disguise as a boy are magnified by the fact that everyone here is playing a role.
“I shall have a share in this most happy wreck,” declares Orsino at the end. A happy wreck sums up this evening of retro charm, vaudevillian clowning but genuine heartbreak too.
- Until Saturday. Box office: 0131-473 2000
