“If this merry band of players arrive in a square of garden near you, grab a ticket.” Shakespeare in the Squares offer a rip-roaring, somewhat time-travelling Twelfth Night.
📍Squares & Gardens throughout London
📅 7th June – 7th July 2023
💷 From £15.76
🕖 7:00pm / Matinee times vary
🕖 Running time (approx.): 2 hours and 30 mins, includes one interval
🖊️ Writer: William Shakespeare
🎬 Director: Sioned Jones
🎥 Executive Producer / Assistant Director: Alex Pearson
🪀 Designer: Emily Stuart
🎶 Music Diector: Annemarie Lewis Thomas
🧵 Costume Supervisor: Dominic Bilkey
🎂 Adult themes 4+ (Under 16’s must be accompanied by an adult)
🎭 Squares & Gardens generally Wheelchair Accessible, but check ahead to be sure.
Shakespeare presents a company with a double-edged sword named familiarity. Whilst Shakespeare has typically swerved the contempt cul-de-sac of contempt, there’s always a risk of simply being one more staging. Too skirt this directors continually reframe the text, moving it around in time, and space, and painting it in the colours of contemporary discourse. Few, however, opt to double down on convention, and its therein, that Shakespeare in the Squares‘ rendition finds a particular magic.
Not the conventions of this century, of course, but of a time when travelling bands of mummers would traipse the land, lucky to have a donkey and cart to haul their meagre props and costume. Just like this merry band, the local green would be all the stage available, the text and their talents all they had to earn their crust.
Appropriately, Toby Gordon, rich in bonhomie as Duke Orsino, and bombast as the Sir Toby Belch, emits actor-manager vibes in spades. His sonorous take on two of the Bard’s more singular male leads is the glue knitting together a rip-roaring, incredibly fun Twelfth Night. It’s a credit to this band of actor-musicians that none are outshone, instead conjuring equally memorable turns.
They do so with very little departure from the the Bard’s text. Noble born twins lose each other in an ocean of grass. Beached upon Illyria, Viola (Carys McQueen), cross-dresses to win a place in the local Duke’s court; her brother Sebastian (Fred Thomas) washed up second, foments all sorts of confusion, wrapped in the lives, loves, and misadventures of the court.
Marissa Landy offers a courtly fool fit for any stage, a puckish Feste with an unerring ability to make modern, laugh out loud comedy from antique punchlines. Richard Emerson’s fool-ish Malvolio struts his time upon the grass with a terrific character-turn whose ego-knifing sufferings threaten the fourth wall with abundant charm. It’s the audience he asks to vouchsafe the ‘love-letter’ he had from his mistress, and its to they he cries when his hopes turn to yellow stocking-ed diaster.
Overall, Director Sioned Jones never lets the pace flag, which slips from scene to scene with a casual grace belying the challenges of a changing room in the bushes. Pushing Ireland’s Maria to be almost more aggressive in love than Orsino, whose affections she rejects, is a particularly nice touch. It certainly softens the consent issues awaiting Sebastian’s arrival, willing to find the boudoir his identical twin Viola has rejected thus far.
Beyond this, the injection of a hearty thread of 20s jazz classics could feel tacked on, but instead it enhances the show’s inherently atavistic merriment. No earlier-century crowd would have made do without a tune, and its fit that this audience should benefit likewise. Bravo Music Director, Annemarie Thomas.
The dextrous talents of the cast are again at the fore, a fairly tight band doing justice to numbers from Gershwin, through Fats Waller. Pricille Grace’s devilish Maria turns a fine chanteuse in particular. Indeed the only thing truly separating Shakespeare in the Square’s Twelfth Night from being a complete tour-de-force is the varying audibility of some passages. Blocking so that certain passages are delivered facing away from most of the audience is the main culprit, though a little inexperience from some in the cast with non-amplified speech may be in play too.
Otherwise this is a very fine, genuinely comedic take on a Shakespeare classic, and worthy of a sack of grain or a night in the barn. If this merry band of players arrive in a square of garden near you, grab a ticket. (is there any other kind? Answers on a postcard, please).
P.S. On the 13th June 2023, the audience assembled at Arrundel & Ladrboke gardens were blessed with another of the Californian days the UK appears to have on long-term lease. It may be the band would caper less in the rain, but I suspect not, indeed what fun might await when the footing turns treacherous?
Twelfth Night is a production of Shakespeare in the Squares, with the support of numerous sponsors..
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