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Inclusion and exclusion are the keynotes of Robin Belfield’s carnivalesque production of Shakespeare’s play, which features a delicious central performance from Ronkẹ Adékọluẹ́jọ́ as Viola. The cast build what’s possibly the strongest rapport with an audience that I’ve ever felt at the Globe and the comedy is delightfully on point. Yet there’s also a powerful sense of what it is to be shut out - the stranger at the feast. It’s great to hear laughter surge around this wooden ‘O’ but also compassionate sighs of sympathy.
Most obviously, the separately shipwrecked Viola and her brother Sebastian (Kwami Odoom) find themselves cast ashore and apparently bereaved in an alien land that’s in festival mode. Their African print tunic suits set them apart from the garish costumes of Illyria, and Adékọluẹ́jọ́’s Viola – posing as a boy and serving Duke Orsino (Solomon Israel) with whom she’s secretly smitten – sounds progressively more Nigerian the more emotional she becomes.
Less clear is the isolation of Laura Hanna’s Lady Olivia, fenced off from the carousing world by grief until hijacked by love for the disguised Viola, and the romantic pain of the Duke who adores her. Pearce Quigley gives a freewheeling comic performance as Olivia’s puritan steward Malvolio, in a prophet’s beard and baggy y-fronts, at one point furiously dismembering a teddy bear, at another gurgling his speeches through a mouth-spreader in a bid to make himself smile. Yet we also powerfully feel his loneliness, and that of the foreign sea captain Antonio (Max Keeble), passionately embroiled with and then rejected by Sebastian.
Not all of it works. The play’s title refers to the end of Christmas celebrations yet here we’re in some mishmash of Mardi Gras and a harvest festival, complete with a grotesque, folk-horror corn-doll costume in which Malvolio is imprisoned. (His plaintive call for a candle is swiftly rescinded for fear of a Wicker Man-style immolation.)
There could be more oomph in the yearnings of Orsino and Olivia, though the latter’s blurted verbal ejaculation – “most wonderful!” – on briefly thinking she has two identical sex partners adds to the production’s healthy dose of smut. Some of the aforementioned Illyrian costumes are jarring, featuring padded mantles and electric-blue, bile-green or jaundice-yellow boots - half circus troupe, half Star Trek. That said, I liked the green, red and purple ecclesiastical garb and outsized head-dresses of Olivia’s household, which makes them look like chess pieces.
Mostly it’s just lovely. Adékọluẹ́jọ́ and Quigley expertly work the audience. So do Jos Vantlyer as the acerbic fool Feste, and Jocelyn Jee Esien as Toby Belch, here recast as a Rabelaisian Lady of Misrule pulling multiple hip flasks from her bra. Ian Drysdale is sweetly oafish as Aguecheek, the knight gulled by her into wooing Olivia. And there’s brash, eye-rolling comedy from Toby’s acolytes Maria (Alison Halstead) and Fabian (Emmy Stonelake). Indeed, the slight blandness of the Illyrian nobles is balanced here by a sharp focus on the likes of Fabian and Antonio, characters often too-easily thrown away.
The music, by Simon Slater, is jazzy and timpani led. Indeed, musical director Lousie Duggan’s drumkit is framed in the bullseye of Jean Chan’s set, a striking, exploded wooden sun. Bits of this drop off hilariously in the scene where Belch and co deceive Malvolio into thinking his mistress loves him. Belfield gives Quigley free rein to indulge his hangdog comic talents and exquisite timing as the steward. I shan’t soon forget his delivery of the line “everything adheres together” while adjusting the crotch of his underwear.
But back to Adékọluẹ́jọ́. She is arguably the most mercurial, transformative actress working today, utterly different and almost unrecognisable in every role she plays. Her Viola has a big-balls swagger when in male drag, a touching vulnerability when she lets the façade drop. She brings fresh nuance and feeling to Shakespeare’s verse, which is not always at the top of the agenda at the Globe. It’s a superb performance in a production that’s riotous fun.
Shakespeare’s Globe, to Oct 25; shakespearesglobe.com
