Russian revolution... Cheek by Jowl's Twelfth Night.
Photograph: Keith Pattison
Is it worth seeing a play in a language you don't understand?
I'm in the Barbican box-office queue with a friend, waiting to pick up tickets for Declan Donnellan's production of Twelfth Night. Someone I know apparates behind me, full of appalling chirpiness. "Isn't it exciting!" he chirrups. "Twelfth Night in Russian!"
No. Really, it's not. I pretend I had remembered this linguistic detail and put on a decent shop front. But my heart is sinking. I've been to a lot of concerts and opera recently, and I was looking forward to some... Shakespeare. You know, spoken word. In English. Plus, it's a hot night, and I have just wrenched myself away from a number of agreeable people who are drinking cool beer in the sunshine.
As we walk into the auditorium, things get worse. The most comfortable theatre seats in London have been replaced with cramped, temporary stadium seating. The set is bare and forbidding. "It's like it's 1990, the Wall has fallen, the arts are still subsidised but everyone else is off doing something more interesting in the west," says my friend.
From the beginning, it looks as if it's going to be pretty hardcore. The entire cast is male. They are all dressed identically, in plain black trousers and white shirts. Instead of starting up with the first words of the play ("If music be the food of love, play on..."), the men each cry out (in Russian, naturally): "My father!" - inexplicably to me. My heart is now in my boots.
Fast forward half an hour, and we're entranced.
It's a wonderful production, brilliantly perceptive about each of the characters' play-acting (this is an Orsino who is clearly in love with being in love) and about Sir Toby Belch's casual cruelty to the smitten Maria. It's funny, it's slick, it's fast.
The shock of the Russian fades after a while. It's frustrating at first to see that gorgeous text on the surtitles not being spoken. It's also frustrating that we're getting only an abbreviated version of it on the screen. It's annoying that the jokes are being "got" at various different paces by the audience (sometimes from reading the surtitles, sometimes from the many Russians in the audience getting the joke as spoken, sometimes from a visual gag). In the end, none of this really matters.
I haven't seen much Shakespeare performed in foreign languages, but each time I have done, it's been riveting. There was Calixto Bieito's Macbeth, in Catalan, which I loved for its messiness and violence (I was in a minority). And Jonathan Kent's Japanese Hamlet at Sadler's Wells a few years back was incisive on the machinations and codes of a secretive court.
It's possible that there's something freeing about doing a play that isn't so freighted with cultural baggage as Shakespeare inevitably is for the British. The Barbican is about to host a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in Japanese. I won't be ruling it out.
