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Love's a Beach

By Natasha Hay

We can be such fools for love, and Michael Hurst's dazzling Twelfth Night perfectly captures the giddy madness of romantic yearning.  Set in the 1950s, his Illyria is a tropical paradise full of colonial misfits and dreamy eccentrics who spend their time languishing on the sunkissed beach; where life's a perpetual cocktail hour and everyone has nothing better to do than fall in love and create mayhem. This is a production as clear and sparkling as its azure ocean.

Sea, sky and sand:  the simplest of design (by John Verryt) is startlingly effective.  Added to this, David Eversfield's lighting exudes a gorgeous, painterly lyricism of sunset, sunrise and a golden glow over the sand, where the main prop is a cream piano with an array of drinks atop.

Here on the beach, deception and disguise, love and desire are untangled amid delicioius games of erotic tension and silliness.  All the characters are prisoners of their desires, with the heat raising libidos and gin fuelling mischief.

The imagination and exuberance of Hurst's production bring many moments of pure magic and the performances are uniformly excellent, with wonderful textual clarity and rich characterisations.

The play's heart belongs to Viola, and Tandi Wright is a sheer delight as she journeys from shipwreck survivor to gender change to ardent love.  It's a pleasure to watch her, vulnerable and comic, as she melts the brittle heart of the haughty beauty Olivia (Jennifer Ward-Lealand), and struggles to hide her love for Orsino (Andrew Laing) and then be movingly reunited with her twin Sebastian (Paolo Rotondo).  Around them is the rollicking buffoonery of Toby Belch (George Henare) and Andrew Aguecheek (Peter McCauley), egged on by lusty, tattooed Maria (Jacque Drew), but a dark undercurrent arrives when they plot to humiliate the unctuous prig Malvolio (Paul Barrett).

Sharpening the sour taste is Feste the fool, played by Oliver Driver with deliberate, out-of-period cynicism.  He ad-libs asides and quaffs any substance he can lay his hands on, but underneath the kidding around is a silvery sadness echoed in the songs he croons like a cheesy nightclub singer (channelling Lou Reed), while barefooted pianist Jason Smith tickles the ivories.

And after all the requisite happy couplings, Feste sings the final song with a tone drenched in melancholy, the stage bathed in a violet hue, so that love and hope give way to loss, conveying the play's Chekhovian shifts in mood.  Brilliant.

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