Anna Burnside reviews ‘a tremendous evening’.
One of the many great things Bard in the Botanics has been doing for 25 years is reminding audiences that many of Shakespeare’s plays were written as popular entertainments. They are meant to be fun. Enter Gordon Barr and his band of regular collaborators to bring joy to the park and update the classics without diluting their magic or relevance.
Twelfth Night, a slight comedy of gentle pranking, gender-swapping and mistaken identity, lends itself brilliantly to director Jennifer Dick’s light touch. Feste, the fool, becomes a one-man juke box, dropping unexpected contemporary numbers along with his gallus chat. He opens the show with Queen’s “Somebody to Love,” which pretty much says it all.
This is a perfectly balanced production. Johnny Panchaud’s Orsino is sweet and earnest in his desperate pursuit of Olivia, played like a sonsie Dolce and Gabbana widow by Lauren Ellis-Steele. Sir Toby Belch, often the main comic relief, is a darkly rakish James Boal. His sidekick, Sir Andrew Aguecheek, is Star Penders as a raucous drag king, approaching the role with the grace of a drunk queuing for chips at the Blue Lagoon.
When Belch and Aguecheek think it would be great sport to trick Olivia’s perjink steward, Malvolio, into wearing yellow stockings, designer Heather Grace Currie accepts the challenge. Stephen Arden unbuttons his raincoat to reveal gold hotpants that Kyle Minogue in their DNA and matching socks.
Arden leaning into the humiliation of wearing fancy dress to the wrong party is just one of the joys of a tremendous evening that uses tropes and tunes of this time while keeping the essence of Shakespeare’s time. It’s a tremendous night out, which is exactly as it should be.
Twelfth Night performs in the Main Botanic Gardens until 11 July 2026 as part of this year’s Bard in the Botanics season. For further details, go to the production’s website.
Photo by Tommy Ga-Ken Wan.
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