Twelfth Night (review)

Twelfth Night is driven by crushes of multiple varieties. Whimsical fantasies, extravagant indulgences, but especially crushes of the most painful kind that hit unawares and prove all-consuming. Because the play is a romantic comedy, the crushes have a way of working out, at least for the so-called "upstairs" characters, but they do so in a particular way. The crushes ultimately prove transformational, ending in forms of self-discovery, awakening, indeed illumination of a general nature. The sorting out of mix-ups and the clarification of mistaken identities get accompanied by the ineffable sense that the characters have, to use a metaphor common to the play and the modern rehearsal room, gone on meaningful journeys. If all this sounds a little too much like the stuff of pulpy romances and Hollywood chick-flicks, one could suggest that these genres have inherited their material to an important degree from Shakespearean comedy.

Which is why it was a brilliant choice by the New York Shakespeare Festival to cast the film actress Anne Hathaway as Viola in its lively and cheerful summer 2009 production of Twelfth Night. At the simplest level, she's the perfect physical type for the role, as she can be at once boyishly dorky and stunningly beautiful. But these physical characteristics have as much to do with the cinematic persona that has developed from playing heroines in coming-of-age stories in which, generally, romance is accompanied by self-discovery and radical transformation. In The Princess Diaries (2001), she plays a gawky teen who learns that she's actually the princess of a fictitious country and, under the tutelage of her royal grandmother (played to comic perfection by Julie Andrews), becomes the swan no one could have imagined, all the while discovering that her true heartthrob is none other than the boy-next-door type she has known all along. Analogously, in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), she's the raggedly dressed and androgynously named Andy Sachs who lands a job in the fashion industry in New York where her dress size—8!—becomes a moniker indicating how distressingly "fat" she is; but true to the genre, she undergoes a fashion makeover (under the tutelage this time of her demonic boss, played by Meryl Streep) that also opens up a whole new way of living. Once again, however, a fling with a new love interest (a hunk of a fashion writer played by Simon Baker) ensues, but she goes back, in the end, to the guy who loved her when she didn't think anything of wearing sweatpants. The film could have been called Sachs, or even Saks, and the City. Finally, in Becoming Jane (2007), she plays a young Jane Austen who discovers love and its entanglements, which then inspire her to write Pride and Prejudice. The romance lines of the films obviously don't mesh entirely with Viola's story, but other elements clearly do: taking on new personas that expose hidden elements of the self and open up new emotional and erotic possibilities; experiencing love with new enlightenment; and...