Twelfth Night/Uncle Vanya
It would be hard to imagine a Twelfth Night more sublime than the one currently playing at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Quiet, elegant, lush, mysterious and romantic, it features Emily Watson as Viola and Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio andlike the production of Uncle Vanya with which it runs in rep through March 9was directed by Sam Mendes, late of Londons Donmar Warehouse Theater, where the two productions premiered last fall.
In an earlier life, the Donmarknown simply as the Warehouse Theaterhad been the Royal Shakespeare Companys second stage in London; that was when the RSC still used the Aldwych Theater as its London base, before the Barbican Centre for the Performing Arts (the companys current home) was built in the early 80s. Ten years ago, Mendes rescued and renamed the space and almost immediately turned it into one of the citys most vital sources of new work.
In the meantime, he has met with success in other, more commercial arenas, as a filmmaker (he directed American Beauty and Road to Perdition) and as a sort of latter-day, sophisticated Hal Prince. (Mendes revival of Cabaret, which began at the Donmar and is currently in its fifth year on Broadway, has become one of New York theaters money machines.) Last December, Mendes announced his intention of stepping down as head of the Donmar and forming his own production company. Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya were Mendes farewell productions.
Performed by a single cast, they offer New Yorkers a chance to see classical theater performed in repertory, a pleasure we have not had since the mid-80s, when the Royal Shakespeare came to New York with Terry Hands productions of Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac. The BAM engagement mirrors that earlier transfer in a number of ways, in fact. That, too, was a pairing of productionsone Shakespeare, one notbuilt around two headliners (Derek Jacobi and Sinead Cusack), but whose actual impact and memorability had less to do with individual performances than with the pleasure to be derived from watching great ensemble acting. Theres an extra cleverness to the casting here. The two plays were chosen for the echoes that exist between the respective patterns of unrequited love they explore. In Twelfth Night, Viola loves Orsino, who pines for Olivia, of whom Malvolio absurdly dreams. In Vanya, Sonya loves Astrov, who pines for Yelena, of whom Vanyabut you get the idea. Its an ingenious insight and it has Ms. Watson, over the course of both playswhich, incidentally, you can see in one day if you opt for a weekend double-headerconsistently mooning (as Viola and Sonya) over Mark Strong (as Orsino and Astrov) and Mr. Strong and Mr. Russell Beale (as Malvolio and Vanya) over Helen McCrory (as Olivia and Yelena). More interestingly, perhaps, it gives Mr. Russell Beale a chance to play two very different versions of the Malcontent and Ms. Watson comic and tragic versions of hopeless love.
As was the case with the RSC repertory productions, Vanya and Twelfth Night share a design team: Anthony Ward (sets), Mark Thompson (costumes) and George Stiles (music). Indeed, a preponderance of music was another element that, Mendes saw, the two plays have in commonor perhaps an attention to the idea of music. Twelfth Night is among Shakespeares most music-oriented plays (consider Orsinos famous opening line, Violas "Make me a willow cabin at your gate" speech and the raucous midnight serenade that gives rise to Sir Tobys "Dost thou think that because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?"). Vanya, too, has that heartbreaking second-act close, which never fails to shock, no matter how many times weve seen it, in which Yelena, about to sit down to a rhapsodic session at the piano, is forestalled by the bald, prosaic, "He says no." Theres also the figure of the broken-down former landowner Telegin (he of the poor complexion) hanging about the Serebryakov estate constantly strumming a guitar.
Stiles settings for Festes songs in Twelfth Night are among the productions many charms, another being the performance of Anthony ODonnell, who plays both Feste and Telegin (he even uses the same guitar in both plays). Its one of the two most all-round-successful pieces of double casting, here in New York at any rate, the other being Mr. Strongs quiet, restrainedand consequently wildly sexyAstrov and Orsino. Brian Friels extremely free translation gives ODonnell a lot to work with, inventing for Telegin an amusing (and audience-pleasing) fixation with Germany.
In other respects, Friels Vanya seems less felicitous. Its long on wit, a little short on grief, though. Unlike his Dublin-tinged Three Sisters, it doesnt seek to draw a parallel between the impoverished Russian and Irish aristocracies, and in contrast to David Mamets version of Vanya, which achieves a kind of poetry of inarticulate disappointment and disillusion, Friels grants Vanya a verbal agility and acumen that leave you wondering what keeps him weltering in his abyss of frustration. Anyway, thats one of the excuses I found myself making for why Ms. Watsons and Mr. Russell Beales performances in the Chekhov seemed disappointing. Friels translation turns Vanya into a kind of proto–Sheridan Whiteside, all withering scorn and biting irony, and this gives Mr. Russell Beale a chance to show us only a more extreme form of the irascibility we see in his Malvolio. We get little sense of the essential needlessness of Vanyas plight: the degree to which he is keeping himself there. It also leaves him ranting in the great confrontation with Serebryakov, and ranting Vanyas are something weve seen many, many times before. Its the sort of performance thats critic-friendly (i.e., easy to describe) but that doesnt really move anyone to the depths of their soul.
Ms. Watson and Ms. McCrory also come off better in Twelfth Night than they do in the Chekhov. As Viola, Ms. Watson shows an uncanny ability to bring a contemporary logic to the cadences of poetry and an even more uncanny ability to walk and stand and move like a very young man. (This seems to have something to do with denying the existence of her waist.) Shes so luminous and charismatic, though; with Sonya, hiding her light is a bit of a problem. Its hard work for her to try to make herself homely and pathetic, and the result is that she succeeds in making Sonya merely irritating. Ms. McCrory, for her part, who makes a winning Olivia (she looks and sounds a little like the very young Glynnis Johns), plays all Yelenas unconscious motivation on the surface. She actually seems hot for Astrov and contemptuous of Sonya rather than merely careless and unwittingly destructive.
In general, its an absence of subtext that keeps this Vanya from rising above the level of any other production. Theres nothing going on beyond what the characters themselves think and say is going on. Great Chekhovlike the version of Vanya we get in Louis Malles Vanya on 42nd Street and the production of the play that Gregory Mosher directed for televisionshows us a gap between how his characters see themselves and what they are really doing. Here, the way the characters see things is the way they are.
Attention in New York has focused mostly on the Chekhov, but it was Twelfth Night that really blew me away. Its an example of an approach to Shakespeare that seems second-nature to the British and that we very rarely see. (The vastly underrated Globe production of Cymbeline that BAM presented last year was another.) Its hard to know what to term it"academic" would be wrong, though its a style hugely driven by textual analysis. That makes it sound static and the whole point is that it rests on a dynamic realization of Shakespeares systems of imagery. Chiefly, its characterized by two things: non-realistic and non-literal staging. The first consists in a refusal to deny at any point that we are watching a play. It often begins with a refusal to set the play in any given particular time or place. Wards set for Illyria is an evocation of nowhere. The stage, open to the back of the theater, is dominated by a single outsized picture frame, centrally placed, that stands midway between the apron and the back wall, at about the point where we would expect a backdrop. Between it and the back wall is a sea of flickering light created by hundreds of candlesticks of differing lengths laid out on the floor and hundreds of lanterns hung from the flies at varying heights. Such scenic elements as there are are either non-specific (a huge vase of arum lilies) or eclectic (a contemporary sofa, an antique French chair). Similarly with the costumes, which rhyme with clothing from a number of different periods: Edwardian (Malvolio), the 1930s (Maria and the other serving women), Restoration (Viola and Sebastian), late Victorian (Orsino).
What this kind of staging does is disarm us, intellectually, taking the onus of plausibility off the play, with its unlikely elements and plot devices, and placing it on the human element. Were seduced into "believing" whats happening between Viola and Olivia or Orsino moment-to-moment because, say, an inconsequential scene with servingmen was played like a staged reading. The result is that we experience the multiple emotional levels and layers of meaning more viscerally and more immediately.
In Mendes Twelfth Night, that picture frame is the key to the productions non-literal aspect. It serves several purposes, functioning sometimes as a literal portraitas at the beginning of the play when Orsino seems to be gazing at a portrait of the Lady Olivia because Ms. McCrory is standing motionless behind the frameand sometimes like a doorway, through which characters enter a scene. From time to time, characters will go and stand in the frame when there clearly isnt supposed to be a literal portrait present, simply because another character is speaking or thinking of them. There comes a point where were forced to ask ourselves whether the frame was ever, even in the opening scene, meant to represent an actual, literal portrait (were forced to conclude not: Orsinos portrait of Olivia in mourning was something that could not be) and to wonder what the frame is doing there. It is, of course, a descant on the extent to which all the characters in the play are acting on the basis of pictures of their own making, pictures of one another. It has its payoff in the closing scene, when the happy resolution of the plot is played outliterallyagainst a backdrop of the subplot: poor, straitjacketed Mr. Russell Beale, as Malvolio, sitting within the compass of the frame.
Twelfth Night and Uncle Vanya, through March 9 at BAM, 30 Lafayette Ave. (betw. Ashland Pl. & St. Felix St.), 718-636-4100; see www.bam.org for complete schedule and ticket info.