National Theatre at Home: Twelfth Night (review)

The streets of Stratford-upon-Avon were uncommonly empty for Shakespeare's birthday on 23 April 2020. In lieu of the normal festivities, the National Theatre brought Simon Godwin's extravagant Twelfth Night(2017) into homes across the nation. The production had originally been broadcast into cinemas on 6 April 2017 with a wealth of framing materials which focused largely on the play's gender politics and (re)casting of Tamsin Greig as a female Malvolia. In its most recent iteration, however, the present pandemic loomed large in the broadcast paratexts with brief and solemn slides lamenting the impact of coronavirus on the arts industry. These paratextual glimpses, which have featured in all of the National Theatre at Home broadcasts, set this play firmly within its new and strange context. Likewise, some of the play's lines now struck a particularly contemporary chord, as when Phoebe Fox's Olivia giddily reflected on love at first sight, observing "even so quickly may one catch the plague" (1.5.285). This line exposed a profound sense of disparity between the show's two audiences, offering an entirely different resonance to those of us watching at home than it had for those in the Olivier auditorium and in cinemas three years ago.

The inclusion of Twelfth Nightas part of the National Theatre at Home initiative also set this broadcast into new contexts beyond the ever-present health crisis. The company's choice to stream productions on YouTube framed this experience within a wider repertoire of streamed arts and theater events, serving as a reminder of the prominent role mediated performance has played in responding to the unprecedented circumstances of the pandemic. Moreover, viewers watching the National's offerings every week would likely have recognized Oliver Chris (Orsino) and Daniel Rigby (Sir Andrew Aguecheek) in their roles a few weeks prior as Stanley Stubbers and Alan Dangle in Nicholas Hytner's production of One Man, Two Guvnors(streamed from 31 March). Their reprisal here of the roles of hapless suitors made these actors an interesting and illuminating point of continuity. In this regard, the awareness of the threat of disease and rate of transmission is perhaps not the only link to Shakespeare's original audiences to arise from the streaming of Twelfth Night. As these actors demonstrate, the National Theatre at Home broadcasts offer an opportunity to read these works in repertory with each other and even with recurring company members.

Godwin's opening vignette of a shipwreck aptly introduced a broadcast which, under Robin Lough's seasoned direction, suffered from a sense of dislocation. Lough's persistent use of side-angle shots to splice the Olivier stage, combined with Soutra Gilmour's pyramid-shaped whirligig of a set, often resulted in close-ups of the actors framed against only the darkened wings or back wall of the theater. Despite their intimacy, these shots created the dissonant effect of the performance taking place in a tight black-box studio, contrasting and clashing with wide angle shots that exposed the cavernous depths of the Olivier stage. Here, the absence of the broadcast's original paratexts was even more pointed; without shots of the theater space which, as Erin Sullivan highlights, "hel[p] contextualize the theatrical space and establish a sense of location" (634), the result was a discomforting lack of spatial clarity.

These wide-angle shots also had the more insidious effect of disadvantaging the...