In Shakespeare’s bittersweet comedy genders blur, boundaries are crossed and the world is turned upside down, all with music as the engine for these bacchanalian shenanigans. Director Wils Wilson saturates this tale of magic and wonder with all the psychedelia and bohemian delight of the ‘summer of love’. Read more …
Desire and grief collide in a heady cocktail as hidden emotions are aroused in a quartet of lovers. Meanwhile frivolity is edged with cruelty as the puritanical Malvolio, transformed for a time into a Technicolor alter-ego, is humiliated and abandoned; a man marooned, left behind by a generation he will never understand.
So join Viola (or is that her twin brother Sebastian?), Orsino, Olivia, Toby Belch and his sidekick Andrew Aguecheek, and the rest of the household for Shakespeare’s most sparkling cocktail of wit and deep feeling. It’s sure to be the party of the year!
It might be a bit indulgent and takes a while to shift gears into the dramatic action, but when it works it is a delight.
There is a strung-out ennui for those locked out of the love-in in this co-production between the Lyceum and Bristol Old Vic. For those turned on and tuned in, however, a groovy kind of love awaits.
With 50/50 gender-split casting, this comedy of disguise and identity enjoys a playful makeover.
A rousing success delivering rambunctious debauchery and yellow stockings to all.
All in all, Wilson’s Twelfth Night is an ambitious attempt to at once embrace the hedonistic elements of Shakespeare’s comedy in a 60s context and highlight its gender identity subtext in a thoroughly modern one. Its success in doing so will likely come down to individual taste – but any which way you look at it, cross-gartered yellow stockings will never be quite the same again.
A real feast of theatre where anyone can become anything, “or what you will”.
Shifting emotions are filtered through autumnal sunlight in the Lyceum’s Twelfth Night, with as much defiant sadness on view as happy resolution.
The subversive party atmosphere Wilson and her ensemble strive to create entertains in snatches, but it is also drawn-out and increasingly infuriating.
The Lyceum offers us a Shakespeare to remember, not for the traditionally-minded or the faint-hearted, but full of visual richness, passion, poetry and thought.
When you can accept that a lava lamp and a squeeze box is a police car you know that you’re in expert hands. This is quite a rare Twelfth Night, suffused with theatre, and I enjoyed it.
The production boasts a universally marvellous cast, tremendously exaggerated design (by Ana Ines Jabares-Pita) and some lovely set pieces.
A wonderful mix of music, comedy, costumes and cabaret.
Wilson definitely brings a fresh eye to a well-known plot, and it’s an entertaining way to spend an evening. It might just make you think a bit too.
Bells and whistles aside, the cast in this production truly shine.
Meilyr Jones--Twelfth Night
Theatre interview: Director Wils Wilson on celebrating the 'roughness' in Twelfth Night at the Royal Lyceum
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