Cottesloe; Hampstead; Arcola, all London
To celebrate his 80th birthday, Peter Hall has returned to the building he once ran and directed a sweetly autumnal Twelfth Night. His breeches-and-farthingale production, set under a canopy flecked with russet-coloured leaves, doesn't break much new ground – there's hardly a moment when it shows you something you'd never suspected was there – but, at its best, it does better than that: it seems completely natural.
Take Simon Paisley Day's icily exact Malvolio, who walks as if he were skating, and whose head lies so still on his ruff that it could be a severed bonce on a platter. Or his polar opposite, Simon Callow's Toby Belch: pink-faced, wobbly cheeks, a belting old fruit. He is every flabby inch the ramshackle roisterer, who announces the keynote of his unbuttoned, spilling-over performance in his spluttering rejection of the notion that he "confine" himself. Yet just as that looks too easy,...
To celebrate his 80th birthday, Peter Hall has returned to the building he once ran and directed a sweetly autumnal Twelfth Night. His breeches-and-farthingale production, set under a canopy flecked with russet-coloured leaves, doesn't break much new ground – there's hardly a moment when it shows you something you'd never suspected was there – but, at its best, it does better than that: it seems completely natural.
Take Simon Paisley Day's icily exact Malvolio, who walks as if he were skating, and whose head lies so still on his ruff that it could be a severed bonce on a platter. Or his polar opposite, Simon Callow's Toby Belch: pink-faced, wobbly cheeks, a belting old fruit. He is every flabby inch the ramshackle roisterer, who announces the keynote of his unbuttoned, spilling-over performance in his spluttering rejection of the notion that he "confine" himself. Yet just as that looks too easy,...
- 1/23/2011
- by Susannah Clapp
- The Guardian - Film News
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