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The Review - THEATRE by SIMON WROE
Published: 16 August 2007

The Bard – slightly mad and absolutely hilarious

TWELFTH NIGHT
Coram’s Fields

SOMETHING of a queer fish in the Shakespeare canon, Twelfth Night’s ostensible leanings towards comedy have always been tempered with a melancholy, malicious edge.
The darker stylings have been all but razed from Principal’s open air production, which has been delighting audiences under the stars throughout August with a broad, convivial take on the classic tale of separated twins, unrequited love and cross-gartered stockings.
Book-ended by a trio of Forces’ sweethearts singing popular 1940s wartime melodies under the paternal eye of Feste (Dean Julian) the court jester, Principal’s Illyria is a place of giddy abandon and witty ad libs.
Shipwrecked Viola (Eleanor Lawrence), disguised as a man so she can serve in the court of Duke Orsino (James Hutchinson), is forced to play Cupid between the master that she loves and his paramour Olivia (Daphne Kourma).
But when Olivia takes Viola/Caesario’s advances in earnest and falls for her, a dangerous love triangle emerges.
Perhaps wisely though, the meat of this summer production lies less in its lovestruck leads and more in the ribald side characters, whose drunken carousing and bawdy muggings under the orchestration of the bilious Sir Toby Belch (an excellent David Hall) would have surely made the Bard proud.
The tragic-comic characters – the much-wronged Malvolio (Russell Wootton) and the foppish Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Tom Crook) kept in favour by nothing more than his purse strings – are consistently hilarious.
Instead of lingering on the denouements that pale our enjoyment, the players launch straight into an all-singing, all-dancing finale, keeping the smiles on our faces for a long time afterwards.
Until August 18
020 8807 6680

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