Twelfth Night

Figure 1.

Helen Hunt as Viola and Kyra Sedgwick as Olivia in the Lincoln Center production of Twelfth Night directed by Nicholas Hytner at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre. Photo: Ken Howard.

A splashy new production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night at the Vivian Beaumont Theatre in New York was a feature attraction of the 1998 Lincoln Center Festival last summer. The well-traveled team of English director Nicholas Hytner and Irish stage designer Bob Crowley, who in 1994 brought to the Beaumont, from London’s Royal National Theatre, an uncommonly dark and disturbing (and intensely stirring) production of Carousel, this time opted for a strategy of almost total immersion. They turned Twelfth Night into a kind of cross between productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (beginning with Peter Brook-inspired light bulbs descending from the ceiling) and The Tempest (including a spectacular on-stage rainstorm)—a very wet dream, indeed.

In fact, Viola (played by Helen Hunt, fresh from her Academy Award) emerged dripping wet from the shipwreck to start the play. Water was a constant symbol: a large rectangular pool upstage and smaller pools downstage occupied much of the acting area, so that characters generally made their entrances and exits over flat bridges—curves which united at the end of the play for the two couples to make a grand exit. The water effect reached its zenith with a tension-breaking downpour that nicely formed its own conceptual bridge from the disappointments and cruelties caused by the characters’ misunderstandings and mistaken identities, to the final scenes of recognition and reconciliation.

A multitude of Eastern motifs also heightened the play’s atmosphere of fantasy. China silk hangings surrounded the stage floor, which was painted with an exquisite blue peacock design taken from Persian carpets and embellished with patterns inspired by Indian illuminated manuscripts. Crowley’s set also provided three different perspectives of Olivia’s house on different-sized drops, which nicely reminded the audience how far from that anchor-point each scene was taking place. Catherine Zuber’s costumes ranged from what appeared to be Turkish harem outfits (for Olivia) to stunning blue and white guards’ uniforms. Natasha Katz’s lighting was also striking, beginning with the large bulbs which descended from the ceiling, like sacred Buddhist candles, and including a light-induced ripple effect on the upstage pool. But it was the directorial touches which were most impressive: one especially memorable moment was a procession of Olivia’s retainers, holding tall Japanese-style umbrellas, over a hanamichi-type ramp.

Unfortunately, if the director and designer were aiming for an overall mood of erotically-charged languor, then for the most part only the languor came through. From the opening tableau, in which Duke Orsino and his men are stretched out on the stage (making it hard to identify, at first, who is speaking the famous opening speech about the relationship between music and love), many of the all-star cast seemed listless. More importantly, the romance between Orsino (played by a long-haired, bare-chested Paul Rudd) and Viola (played with low-key irony by Hunt) never really seemed to catch fire, despite her stripping him almost naked at one point (giving him an excuse to jump in one of the pools). Olivia (played by a glamorous but shrill Kyra Sedgwick) was, quite literally, all over the place; she bounded and lunged over the stage in increasingly revealing outfits which reduced her from supposed sexual unavailability to what seemed more like sexual desperation.

The supporting cast was uniformly superb, from a perfectly fussy and self-deluded Malvolio by Philip Bosco (whose performance in the famous letter-reading scene was a priceless puncturing of vainglory) to precise comic turns by Brian Murray as an almost-Falstaffian Sir Toby Belch, and Max Wright as an unusually doddering Sir Andrew Aguecheek (who, perhaps too predictably, ended up falling into one of the pools). And David Patrick Kelly stole the show as a short, hump-backed Feste, crooning the rhythmic, quasi-Country and Western...