I had not been to Orange Tree Theatre for a little while, by my standards, for various reasons but Shakespeare is always tempting so I forked out £29 for a seat in the second row (B45).
The billing for the show included "Oliver Ford Davies, one of the leading Shakespearean actors of his generation, returns to the OT to play Malvolio, opposite Jane Asher as Maria" and they both made the poster but while it is always good to see fine actors that was not part of my decision making.
This Twelfth Night was set in the 1940s and featured music and songs played on a piano in the middle of the stage. That might sound a little extreme, perverse even, but I found it to be a fairly honest version of the play and it was all the better for being so with the original words doing all of hard work.
Well, nost of the hard work - those words needed good actors to deliver them and with this cast we had them. In an ensemble performance I will pick on just two for special mention, Patricia Allison (also in the poster) as an earnest Viola and Robert Mountford as a gloriously funny Andrew Aguecheek.
Twelfth Night is one of Shakespeare's funnier and more approachable plays and this version was a lot of fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment
All comments are welcome. Comments are moderated only to keep out the spammers and all valid comments are published, even those that I disagree with!