You can see why director Gordon Barr chose to set Twelfth Night in the wings of a theatre. Heather Grace Currie’s design – all ropes, dressing-room lights and velvet curtains – places Shakespeare’s comedy in a world of pretence. All it takes is a new costume from the wardrobe, and your identity has changed.
This is not just responsive to the play’s theme about the unreliability of outward appearances – whether that be the confusion sown by identical twins or the embarrassment of a man tricked into wearing the wrong clothes. It is also, with a cast of six, a pragmatic way of fielding the key characters. If it means by the end we are watching Jennifer Dick as Orsino (a woman playing a man) falling for Stephanie McGregor as Viola (a woman playing a woman who has just been pretending to be a man), well, it only adds to the merry questioning of the true nature of love.
Streamlined to 90 minutes and played outdoors in a single sitting, it’s a cheerful show that trots through the story with broad steps. Though the play hangs together, the editing sacrifices some detail: Alan Steele’s Malvolio, in particular, has scarcely had time to establish his pompousness when he finds himself ridiculed and deceived. Elsewhere, the more knockabout the performances, the less funny the results.
You can, however, always rely on Nicole Cooper for subtlety – and the advantage of a small cast is we see plenty of her. She lights up the stage not only as Olivia, sparring wittily with an equally intelligent McGregor, but also as Sir Andrew Aguecheek, in a funny sendup of boorish masculinity.
At Bard in the Botanics, Glasgow until 31 July.
