It's counter-intuitive, but by presenting an "original practices" version of "Twelfth Night", Shakespeare's Globe Theatre offers an entirely new perspective on the play. Though performed in conventional Elizabethan dress, accompanied by original period instruments and, most notably, using men to perform the women's roles, director Tim Carroll's production contains anything but received wisdom about the work's meaning. Instead, it uses the reversal of gender as a jumping-off point for emphasizing the reversals throughout Twelfth Night, in which wise men are foolish and fools wise, while prideful vice masquerades as virtue. The results are at once comic, romantic and excitingly thought-provoking.
Among his many good decisions, Carroll's best was to make the exchange between Feste and Olivia in their first scene-"Take away the fool!"-the touchstone for the entire production. Feste is the jester, but it's Olivia's idiocy that drives the action; so which one is the fool? Appearance shadow-boxes with reality in every corner of the play, not just the scenes where Viola masquerades as Cesario. Reversals are everywhere, so that the sober and virtuous Malvolio gets put in restraints while the riotous Sir Toby ends up respectably married to Maria. Orsino seems peculiarly attached to a boy while Olivia, at least, falls for someone of the appropriate gender-but it's Orsino's love that turns out to be true. Cross-dressing illuminates the play's network of crossed wires as no other approach could.
All this depends on top-quality performance, especially from Olivia: though in other productions the Countess seems ancillary to the Orsino-Viola romance, here she's front and center. Globe Artistic Director Mark Rylance plays her superbly, giving the character layers that are peeled back along with her excess mourning. Especially because he's a man, Rylance's hyper-feminine performance (pursed lips and falsetto voice and mincing steps) makes fun of Olivia right from the start. This sets the character up to be that much funnier when love sweeps her away, and mincing gives way to wild loping across the stage while prissy locution descends into stammering incoherence. Remarkably, without any change in makeup Rylance is able to transform Olivia's frozen whitefaced mask into a highlighted screen on which her passion is projected for all to see. It's an amazing performance, and brings out the best in Olivia's scene partners, particularly Michael Brown as Viola. Brown presents a softer, more "natural" femininity than Rylance, while being man enough to be confused with Rhys Meredith's Sebastian by the audience as well as the characters. Brown makes a fine job of being a romantic heroine, without ridiculing his character or distancing himself from her. Liam Brennan's Orsino is matinee-idol material; invisible windows steamed up as he gazed into Viola's eyes, and even his inexplicable Scottish accent seemed somehow sexier than the standard RADA voices around him.
Among the clowns, only Feste (Peter Hamilton Dyer) is particularly good, and Timothy Walker is notably unequal to playing Malvolio. The role is difficult to begin with, calling for an actor to go from supercilious to abject and back again while evoking laughter mixed with sympathy along the way. In a comedy of reversal, he's inside-out to begin with: to Elizabethan eyes Malvolio was recognizable as a closeted gay man, making his pipe-dream of marrying Olivia ludicrous from the start. Then reversals pile on top of one another, as the cross-garters get added to the yellow stockings, the disciplinarian is subjected to punishment, and finally the revenged-upon vows revenge. It's a problem in the play that Malvolio's bitter edge takes over, but usually there's plenty of laughter beforehand to sweeten the outcome. Here, neither of Malvolio's showcase scenes is especially funny: the scene in which he finds the fake letter is slow and the scene with the wild costume is enlivened only by Olivia's reactions. Of the other clowns, Peter Shorey as Maria is funniest simply by virtue of being a balding man with five o'clock shadow playing a saucy maid.
Performances in drag are generally insulting to women, and I was ready to dislike Twelfth Night on that basis. This production, though, seems to validate the notion of reproducing the conditions of Shakespeare's time down to the last jot and tittle, including the absence of women from the stage. I do wonder whether Rylance, having played Olivia, plans to play Othello with burnt cork and prosthetic lips; but that's a question for another day.