North Coast Prep: Twelfth Night

The juniors and seniors of North Coast Prep elected to do two different plays instead of double-casting one, as they usually do. They played over two recent weekends in the Gist Theatre at HSU.

The second play to be seen was something of a departure from modern dramas of the past several productions--this time, a comedy by Shakespeare: Twelfth Night.

Twelfth Night probably premiered in wintry London exactly 406 years before North Coast Prep presented their shorter version, when on the North Coast, too, “… the rain it raineth everyday.” It's a somewhat controversial comedy. Some see it as witty and rambunctious, others as bitter and troublesome, especially in the treatment of Malvolio. Auden called it an unpleasant comedy, a precursor to Shakespeare's dark dramas which soon followed.

There's a quite good movie version from 1996, with Helena Bonham Carter, Ben Kingsley and Nigel Hawthorne. As that film suggests, the play is known for the number of good roles that allow the actors to shine, and so several talented North Coast Prep students did. Though the words were not always intelligible (at least to me), the direction was so clear and the actors so prepared that the audience was able to follow the action. Special credit therefore goes to director Jeanne Bazemore, who may have set a North Coast record with three shows in three weeks, and to assistant director Gretha Omey.

The program notes emphasize the play as an entertainment for the Twelfth Night celebrations in early 17th century London (it's the play that the Judi Dench version of Queen Elizabeth commissions Shakespeare to do, just after she'd seen Romeo and Juliet, in Shakespeare in Love. Though this is fictional, one of the many subtle touches of this movie--probably due to Tom Stoppard's co-authorship--is that as we see Shakespeare imagining Twelfth Night, the character Viola's shipwreck referred to in the play is cleverly transposed to the actual shipwreck of Jamestown colonists, with the Viola of the movie--Shakespeare's fictional beloved played by Gwyneth Paltrow, who was off to America--as its survivor.)

This view of the play as an entertainment for that celebration is an interesting and valid approach, since the tradition of the festivals in which peasants became the Lords of Misrule for a day, and tradition of the jester or "allowed Fool" which lasted for centuries, are important historically as well as artistically.
And confusions of the brother and sister in the play, as well as one of the more famous Shakespearian uses of the Fool, does reflect those traditions.

But while this version told the story with fluidity across the expansive set, it was more a simplified entertainment than an illuminating exploration of the play. But of course a school play has other purposes, with the resulting limitations, such as casting. Still, a number of these students clearly could be quite successful as performers as they move on from high school.

Once more, Gerald Beck's set was wonderfully evocative, but instead of heaping the usual praise, I will quarrel slightly with his choices as lighting designer. As no less a theatre mind than Laurence Olivier knew, in a play with a lot of words, brighter is better. People hear better when they see better.