Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night

By Alex Mackey

Trevor Nunn’s 1996 adaption of ‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’ takes a distinctly more dramatic and melancholy approach to the original play. The cast includes Imogen Stubbs as Viola, Toby Stephens as Orsino, Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia, Steven Mackintosh as Sebastian, Richard E. Grant as Sir Andrew Aguecheek and Ben Kingsley as Feste. The physical similarity between the main characters (Viola, Orsino and Sebastian, and Sir Andrew to a lesser extent) and the similarities in costume emphasises the sense of flexibility of their identities and the general equality between them. This also overcomes the problem faced by modern directors using a mixed-gender cast, whereas in original productions all-male casts would naturally look similar.

In terms of faithfulness to the original text, Nunn’s film is for the most part accurate, with a few cuts of peripheral scenes and lines. The adaption however has some more extreme editing to group major scenes together. The most notable element of the adaption is the focus on Feste’s songs and rhymes, which are used throughout the adaption and as ‘book-ends’ at the beginning and end of the film. This has the effect of placing the story in a bard-like oral tradition of storytelling, suggesting a more allegorical or fantastical understanding of the narrative. As mentioned however, the overall effect of Nunn’s adaption is dramatic and realistic, with austere countryside settings and toned-down comedic scenes.

Costume and setting also have a subtle effect on the tone of the adaption. By using 19^th Century Central European dress, the film suggests an impending end to happiness through its associations with the eventual First World War and collapse of various European empires. This recalls Bahktin’s Carnival and uses war as the ultimate historical example of an end to prosperity, and the freedom of the Carnivalesque, felt at the end of the 19^th Century.

Ben Kingsley as Feste the clown is one of the more unusual roles in the film, with not only his distanced songs of narration but also a character almost devoid of actual comedic lines. The delivery of the line “No Sir I live by the church” is disdainful and impatient, and his verbal wit suggests world-weariness rather than a mastery of language. He is presented as a melancholy seer who undermines the action of the play through frequent reminders of inevitable sadness and disaster. His costume also noticeably separates him from the rest of the cast, which combined with the blurred boundaries of his diegetic and non-diegetic songs removes him almost entirely from the play.

Overall, Nunn’s adaption offers an interesting approach to the limits of comedy. The sense of foreboding found in the original text is emphasised throughout through various means, and is a useful example of blurred genres in Shakepeare’s comedies. The film is also useful for an exploration of the Carnival, as well as issues of gendered identity and desire.