If Music Be The Food Of Love.......

The Bard's work has been around for more than 400 years so the eternal challenge for any company of actors is not so much speaking the text, for there are many productions against which to compare, but finding a new way in which to present Shakespeare's time worn plays.

I have seen Romeo & Juliet set on a modern housing estate and Hamlet done in Nazi uniforms, so how does one transform Shakespeare's 'cusp' play, Twelfth Night, into something that is visually challenging and entertaining?

You drop it into America's Prohibition period and take your audience back to Brooklyn, when jazz was in its early zenith, and the Mafia was taking full root in the Big Apple and Chicago.

I refer to this as a cusp play because it was written at the beginning of the 17th century, and followed a string of comedies penned by the great man.

However, whilst still largely a comedy, Twelfth Night was also a precursor to Shakespeare's more 'tragic' period and the likes of King Lear. So, at its heart there are plenty of laughs - and music - but as a play it doesn't have the squeaky-clean endings so common to Shakespeare's earlier work.

But this didn't prevent the musically talented cast from The Watermill Theatre delivering a wonderful production, filled to the brim with great singing, music and grade one performances.

The Watermill has become known around the world for its bold, ensemble driven approach to presenting Shakespeare, and was at the York Theatre Royal as part of the city's International Shakespeare Festival.

Bohemian, outlandish, isolated: Illyria is a land where everyone has lost something and they will use any means to survive. Viola (Rebecca Lee) is washed ashore. Compelled to survive in a mysterious ethereal land, she disguises herself as Cesario to serve the solitary Duke Orsino (Jamie Satterthwaite). What follows is a tale of mistaken identities, seduction and transformation, leading to a complex love triangle and the potential destruction of all propriety.

Twelfth Night represents a balance between comedy, romance and tragedy but, in this case, it was also driven forward by a great selection of energetic jazz music, including the radical spirit of Duke Ellington, Django Reinhardt and Ella Fitzgerald.

But alone, they would have merely been names from a Golden Era of jazz. However, put in the hands of a great cast, they took on a renewed meaning. Lauryn Redding, a somewhat shapely schemer in the form of Sir Toby Belch was great, as was her sidekick fop Aguecheek, played beautifully and brainlessly by Mike Slader.

Shakespeare is better for knowing and for my guest it was his first time watching any of the Bard's work. He is 60 and I was nervous. "That was great," he said at the end, to my relief. "I lost track of who was who and I could have done with a few of them giving it a bit more welly on the vocals but then again," he pondered, "I probably need a hearing aid. But it were reet good."

I agree, it were reet good!

Twelfth Night
York Theatre Royal