Twelfth Night, With Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry

Well… talk about a reversal!  As ham-fisted, flat-footed and ill-conceived was the Shakespeare’s Globe production of Richard III, its Twelfth Night is nimble, smart, funny and delightful.  It is, happily, simply the finest Shakespearean comedy that I have seen in decades.  Like its sister production performed on the same set, Twelfth Night strives for Elizabethan authenticity, with period instruments, authentic costumes and males playing female parts. 

Where to begin?  The direction by Tim Carroll is loose and light-on-its feet.  His staging of Richard was lumbering, but here the cast virtually dances through the play.  It never loses it sense of comic pacing, the rhythm and tempo underscoring the moments of farce and comedy both high and low.

Mark Rylance as Olivia – suddenly love-struck after mourning the death of her father and brother  – is a marvel.  All of the fusty business of his Richard is gone, and his natural gifts as a comedian shine.  In his skillful playing, he manages to convey both the tragedy of mourning and the giddy realization of both affection and sexual passion.  Olivia always straddles a difficult line: we are sympathetic to her love for Cesario (who is actually a woman, Viola, in disguise) but tickled at her transformation and seductive quest.  Rylance makes Olivia a profoundly moving comic figure.

Equally moving is the magisterial Stephen Fry as Malvolio.  This is Fry’s first Broadway appearance, and it would be difficult to think of a more challenging role for his debut.  Malvolio – a figure of steady courtesy, sobriety and decorum – is duped by the play’s comic figures into playing the lover to Olivia.  He is thrown into a sunless dungeon for this effrontery and Fry wonderfully embodies the straight-arrow, the foolish wooer and the injured party.  Like Olivia, it is an extremely tricky role – Twelfth Night is not Malvolio’s play, but his presence often resounds with the greatest resonance.  Fry carries both Malvolio’s gravitas and folly on his sizable shoulders in a performance that is not to be missed.

Equally excellent is Samuel Barnett as Viola/Cesario.  The heavy pancake makeup he wears in Richard III, strangely, works surprisingly well in a comedic setting.  Twelfth Night capitalizes on his amazing resemblance in makeup to Joseph Timms (as twin-brother Sebastian) to create an astounding end-of-play revelation.  This resemblance was a misstep in Richard III – but here, the payoff is nothing short of magical.

Equally deserving praise is Paul Chahidi as Maria – who is equal measures comic figure and villain.  He skillfully got laughs without ever losing sight of Maria’s inherent venom.  And Angus Wright, so windy and flat as Buckingham Richard III, delivers a deft comic performance as Sir Andrew Aguecheek – and his near-duel with Cesairo/Viola is a riotous comic set piece.

Finally, special mention must be made of the beautifully spoken and sung performance of Peter Hamilton Dyer as the fool, Feste.  In a play of fools, it is a typical Shakespearean irony that the sanest, and perhaps sweetest, man wears motley.  His singing of the final song is deeply moving, and a fitting finale to the evening.

And moving is perhaps the note upon which to end.  Twelfth Night has always been, at least to your correspondent, a difficult play.  The overwhelming action of the plot revolves around various practical jokes, many of them committed with malice deep and damaging.  Because of the impersonation of Viola/Cesario and thanks to the japes and wheezes of Maria, Aguecheek and Sir Toby Belch, one man is imprisoned to the point of nearly losing his sanity, two men come perilously close to killing each other in a duel, and a lonely woman becomes a figure of fun by falling in love with another woman disguised as a man.  We laugh at all of this, but I found myself saddened, as well.  Olivia’s love for Cesario (at one point, she grabs a halberd in his defense) is no less real for being comic, and Malvolio’s wrongful imprisonment is hard to laugh away. 

Twelfth Night is the last day of the Christmas holidays – and the festive season is never mentioned in the play.  Perhaps Shakespeare selected the title as an indication of the bitter-sweet quality we often feel at the end of our revels.  Or, perhaps he wished to create a light comedy for those who laugh, and a more subtle, darker farce for those who think.  It can be no mistake that the full title is Twelfth Night – Or What You Will.

Richard III, With Mark Rylance

It’s not often the Shakespeare’s Globe productions make it to the US, so when they arrive it is cause for riotous celebration.  So … it is with a great deal of disappointment that I report that the recent production of Shakespeare’s Richard III at the Belasco Theatre starring Mark Rylance (born 1960) is an ill-conceived, ramshackle conception.  This is a great shame as Rylance is one of the most gifted actors of his generation – however, I doubt I have ever seen a more wrong-headed interpretation of Shakespeare’s crookbacked anti-hero.

Problems with Richard III start at the top and the rot continues down.  As written, Richard is a charming monster.  He revels in his villainy, and his constant asides to the audience make us complicit in his monstrosity.  His ego is enormous and his self-satisfaction over the most wretched and heinous crimes become droll in his endless self-regard and delight in manipulation.  In short, it is a role for an actor with a High Comic sensibility.

Sadly, High Comedy is not in Rylance’s bag of tricks.  He is an expert Low Comedian, and while he does get laughs with Richard, the overall conception never comes alive.  Imagine Peter Sellers’ Inspector Clouseau disguised as Richard III, and you get the idea.  There is a great deal of business between Rylance and the audience in the first few rows, where he is mugging for a response, while some of his most malefic lines are thrown away as under-the-breath asides.  This is not High Comic villainy, it’s a homicidal Nigel Bruce.  It is a novel approach, but that is all.

Richard III is presented in repertory with Twelfth Night, and in strives to recreate an Elizabethan theatrical experience.  True to the time, all women’s roles are played by men.  I have seen this work wonderfully well in the past (I recall the troupe Cheek By Jowl in a series of Shakespearean productions at BAM 20 years ago that were stunning), but the effect here is more Monty Python than Renaissance theater.  Joseph Timms, as Lady Anne, is so heavily made up that he seems more like a waxwork figure.  (White pancake makeup applied with a trowel, one would assume, to ape portraits of Elizabeth.) Sad to say that equally dire is Samuel Barnett, as Queen Elizabeth, who unfortunately resembles Timms in makeup to such a degree that it’s almost impossible to tell one from the other.

Richard the III is really Richard’s play, and there aren’t many other good roles; however, what is here is poorly played.  Angus Wright, as Buckingham, looks and sounds like Raymond Massey … and is just as bad an actor.  But perhaps the most egregious offender of the evening is Kurt Egyiawan as the Duchess of York, and later as Richmond -- in a lifetime of watching Shakespeare on stage, I have never seen a more wretched performance.  Only Liam Brennan, as Clarence, seems to make something of his part.  I hope to see more of him in the future.

Tim Carroll directs and makes rather a hash of it.  The staging is unimaginative and, at times, simply ridiculous.  Troubled by dreams of his victims, Carroll parades them backstage in white sheets holding candles; more Our Gang than Halloween horror.  How such a gruesome play was rendered so bloodless may be the great mystery of this production.  It ends with Richard and Richmond locked in mortal combat – but it never convinces.  Nor does it help that – in an attempt to create a true Elizabethan experience – the entire cast gather onstage at curtain’s fall and pad through a clumsy quadrille.

We are seeing Twelfth Night later this week; it is Stephen Fry’s Broadway debut, and perhaps his intelligence, taste and sense of fun will positively impact on the production.  We can but hope.

Part II -- Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde

Today we conclude our review of Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright

In short, Wilde is too large a personality, too large a mind for us to get our hands around comfortably.  Just when we think we’ve cut him down to a manageable size – oh yes, the man who loved not wisely nor well enough – some other aspect of Wilde comes to pull away the veil through which we see the distorted image.  Just when we think of Wilde’s life as a great tragedy, he laughs at us; and when we think of his deep and rich vein of comedy, he makes us weep at the equally rich and deep agonies of life.  (Languishing in prison, Wilde was asked by a guard about then-popular novelist Marie Corelli.  And Wilde, a man at that time in hell, said from behind his prison bars, “Now I don’t think I’ve got anything to say against her moral character, but from the way she writes, she ought to be in here.”)

We keep returning to Wilde, but none of our recreations rings entirely true.  The movies have been particularly unkind to Wilde.  Robert Morley, a gifted actor within his own range, was never more than a walking aphorism in Oscar Wilde (1960), and Peter Finch and Stephen Fry (in 1960s’ Trials of Oscar Wilde and 1997’s Wilde, respectively) both have a martyred look, as if Wilde’s life was all tragedy and no comedy.  And the Wilde of Nikolas Grace in Salome’s Last Dance (1988) was … not the Wilde of history or myth.  None of these actors manage to convince as a man of genius, though Vincent Price, in Diversions of Delights, has come, perhaps, closest to the Wilde of fact and legend, and Edward Hibbert was also excellent as the replacement Wilde in Gross Indecency.

Wilde has now turned up in a series of detective novels of varying qualities by Gyles Brandreth, the latest of which is Oscar Wilde and the Dead Man’s Smile.  These books are amusing time-wasters, rich with little details of Victoriana, but Wilde running around pretending to be Sherlock Holmes is something of a misconception.  And Neil McKenna's 2003 biography, The Secret Life of Oscar Wilde is an insult both to Wilde and to anyone engaged in real biographical research.  I have never seen a “biography” use the words “perhaps” and “possibly” with such wilde abandon.  Indeed, many of McKenna’s assertions (and McKenna makes a bunch them) start as off-hand jokes made by Wilde morph into bizarre and convoluted theories of Wilde’s sexual practices.  This is rather like the Life of Wilde authorized by The National Enquirer … and about as authoritative, too.

However, every now and then a new book on Wilde comes along that manages to both capture the real, multiform Wilde, and also radically redefine how we think about him.  And Built of Books: How Reading Defined the Life of Oscar Wilde, by Thomas Wright, is such a book.

Built of Books (published as Oscar’s Books in the UK) is a visionary type of literary biography: a look at Wilde’s life as measured by the books he had read.  As such, it is not obsessively concerned with the factual incidents of Wilde’s external life.  (For that, I recommend Richard Ellmann’s masterful Oscar Wilde.)  Instead, what Wright attempts to do is immerse himself in Wilde’s reading and, by so doing, enter into the great man’s mind itself.  Few biographies dare intrude upon the subject’s internal life; Wright attempts to recreate it.  It is a daring and audacious plan, one that in lesser hands could only end is disaster or ridicule.  Instead, Wright manages to magically resurrect Wilde and map the myriad and poetic byways of his mind.  In more than 30 years of reading about Wilde, I have never come across so original, so accessible and so successful a book.  Here is Oscar Wilde, brought back to life.

Wright takes us through Wilde’s upbringing – largely resting on the oral tradition of Irish folklore.  Wright posits that this is the wellspring of Wilde’s particularly musical language, and his gifts as a talker, as well.  He takes us by the hand and leads us through Wilde’s years at university, outlining the Hellenism that was one of the tent poles of his philosophy, as well as introducing us to the aestheticism that grew out of this hothouse atmosphere.

Later chapters take us through Wilde’s personal Tite Street library, his prison reading lists (and book bills), and the books he bought while roaming the Continent following his disgrace.  Wright had the enviable honor of examining many of Wilde’s personal volumes, and makes deductions about the physical act of Wilde reading (usually while drinking wine or sometimes actually nibbling on the pages themselves).  He also traces Wilde’s thinking based on various marginalia and from inscriptions in presentation copies to friends and lovers.

Like most great biographies, Built of Books was the result of a personal quest.  Like many who worship at the Alter of Oscar, it started for Wright with a boyhood reading of The Picture of Dorian Gray.  His interest in Wilde and the intellectual life of Victorian England grew, and, over time, he became obsessed by the man and his reading.  As he writes, Wilde would be my Virgilian guide to the circles of world literature; his life and art the thread with which I would navigate the labyrinth of the history of ideas.  I hoped, too, that he would be a sort of Socratic mentor, who would help me give birth to a new self.  He vowed to read every book that Wilde had read, as well, and eventually ended up in Wilde’s alma mater, Magdalen.  Candidly, Wright notes in the final chapter that he was not intellectually up to the task.  Having produced a list of volumes that I was certain Wilde had read (or at least owned), I was forced to confront the even more depressing truth that, intellectually, I was simply not up to the task of comprehending them all … It is ironic that Wilde characterized his own period as an “age of the over-worked and the under-educated;” an age in which people were “so industrious that they become absolutely stupid” and where thought was “degraded by its constant association with practice.”  What would he say if he came back to visit the philistine, workaholic, mortgage-enslaved England of our day?

Wright recognizes that Wilde was that rarity – a dandy with a sense of humor – and writes with sly wit, himself.  His book is peppered with little asides that gladden the heart.  When writing about an impassioned fan letter Wilde received from a young man, he writes: [Wilkinson] was also very appreciative of Wilde’s suggestion regarding his reading.  “I shall always,” he wrote, “be grateful to you if you trouble to recommend me particular poetry to read; I am thankful to say that I play neither football nor cricket, so I am really comparatively at leisure.”  It is a shame that the pair were destined never to meet, because Wilkinson sounds exactly Wilde’s type.

Like others, Wright was introduced into the furnace of Wilde’s art and intellect through The Picture of Dorian Gray, and has come out of it a different man.  He more than repays that debt by breathing life into Wilde once more with Built of Books, the most remarkable, enjoyable and revitalizing act of literary alchemy I’ve read in many years.

And the Oscar Goes To….

Vincent Price as Oscar Wilde

For many of us, there is one author who seems to capture the essence of our innermost thoughts and philosophies; our daydreams and waking dreams are put down on paper and the secrets of our lives exposed to the reading world before we have actually lived them.

For me, the author with whom I’ve had the most affinity was Oscar Wilde, patron saint of this blog.  My intellectual and spiritual relationship with Wilde’s work is worthy of a detailed essay, but for today I wanted to discuss representations of Wilde himself, presented in other media.

Though Wilde has appeared as a character in several films, I never thought that any particular actor has captured the whole essence of the man.  Robert Morley played Wilde on stage, and later in the 1960 film Oscar Wilde, but his interpretation never seemed to me in any way organic.  Never for a moment could I sufficiently suspend disbelief that I was watching Wilde rather than an amusing and witty actor cast outside of his range. 

For while Morley was an actor of surprising range when he chose to exercise it, physically and emotionally he was all wrong for Wilde.  In addition, Morley’s film was based on a very popular (at the time) play Oscar Wilde by Leslie and Sewall Stokes, which sought to paint Wilde as something of a tragic martyr.  He was indeed that, to a degree, but this view is such a distortion of the whole picture of Wilde’s life as to ring false.  (It’s interesting to note that John Neville played Lord Alfred Douglas, Wilde’s seducer and destroyer; Neville and Morley played brothers Sherlock and Mycroft Holmes in the otherwise forgettable Study in Terror.)

Closer to the mark, I think, was Peter Finch, who played Wilde in The Trials of Oscar Wilde, also in 1960.  The film itself is not particularly good, though James Mason is a standout as Edward Carson, the man who prosecuted Wilde.  Finch’s Wilde was closer to a three-dimensional human being than the caricature created by Morley could ever hope to be, and one wishes that the performance was surrounded by a better film. 

Nickolas Grace played Wilde in Ken Russell’s ornate, rather repulsive Salome’s Last Dance in 1988.  Those familiar with Russell’s oeuvre will either be simpatico to his approach, or not.  This film is not available on DVD (neither are Oscar Wilde or The Trials of Oscar Wilde), but it often plays in revival houses and is interesting for the Russell completist.

The most critically successful Wilde in movies has been Stephen Fry, who starred in the simply titled Wilde in 1997.  This film was a significant success, and helped launch the career of Jude Law, who played Lord Alfred Douglas.  It’s time that I admitted to the rather unpopular view that I thought Fry was not particularly good in the part, and that the film underwhelming.  (Law, on the other hand, is a powerhouse, and possibly delivered his best performance to date – his Douglas is beguiling, dangerous and utterly crackers.)

Fry, director Brian Gilbert and screenwriter Julian Mitchell work so hard to make Wilde a tragedy that, they too, make the same error as Robert Morley: the tragic Wilde is not the complete picture, and is a distortion of the very essence of the man.  For despite how ornate or perfumed his character and outlandish and eccentric his behavior, Wilde was also the supreme comedian of his age.  Any motion picture of Wilde is fundamentally untrue unless it is also, to some degree, wickedly funny.  Wilde the martyr is free of comedy – but Wilde the comedian who became a martyr is a complex and more interesting figure.

Not surprisingly, Wilde is most effectively portrayed onstage, where audiences seem more comfortable with this paradox than in our movie houses.  Moisés Kaufman’s masterful Gross Indecency creates for us a Wilde who is archly funny and profoundly tragic.

Perhaps the finest representation of Wilde was in John Gay’s one-man play, Diversions and Delights, which starred Vincent Price on Broadway at the Eugene O’Neill Theater in 1978, and later, off-Broadway, at the Roundabout Theater.  The conceit of the play is Wilde, near the end of his life and living under the pseudonym Sebastian Melmoth, gave a lecture in Paris telling the story of his life.

It would be nearly impossible to imagine a more serendipitous collusion of actor and part than Vincent Price and Oscar Wilde.  Both were great champions of the arts, both men of deep erudition and each possessed a natural and delicious wit.  I was lucky enough see Price in Diversions and Delights at the Roundabout nearly every night of its run, and now whenever I think of Wilde, on one level or another I imagine Price.  It is, to date, the definitive performance of Wilde.

Happily, Gay’s Diversions and Delights is about to be revived by the Ensemble Theater Company under Kevin Shinnick.  We caught up with Mr. Shinnick last week to get an over of his plans for Diversions and Delights, and his vision of the fledgling Ensemble Theater Company.

Tell us about the Ensemble Theater Company

Well, Craig Dudley and came this close about two years back to getting a production of Diversions and Delights off the ground Off Broadway , so we decided we would now try and form a new nonprofit Professional Off Broadway Equity Approved Company.  Diversions and Delights will be our first production.

What are the company goals?

We want to offer hands-on experience and support to the next generation of theatre artists and audiences, and to produce quality, intelligent theatre that will engage, inspire, entertain and challenge with forgotten or retired theatrical productions; and to celebrate the essential power of the theatre and an ensemble cast to illuminate our common humanity.

We also want to provide opportunities to actors and others interested in pursuing a career in the theatre industry by offering them a chance to learn from seasoned mentors and give them exposure to talent, situations and experiences that they might not otherwise have in their current educational situations.  Though it’s probably best to remember something Wilde said at this point:  “Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught!” - Oscar Wilde

Will you have a stock company of actors?

We will have company members but the ideal is to bring new talent both off and on stage , and let them work with those who are professionals and get them seen . Plus we want to provide talented professionals having difficulty getting seen to show their talent to others…

Why did you choose Diversions and Delights as your inaugural show?

Frankly, it is a show I fell in love with back in 1978 when I sat front row center and watched Vincent Price become the legendary wit and playwright.  

The play is currently unpublished (though trying to find a company smart enough to pick it up), so we were fortunate enough to speak to the very generous and talented author, John Gay. 

What is it about Oscar Wilde that continues to make him relevant and compelling in the 21st Century?

In an age of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell ,gay marriage, gay rights, as well as civil liberties being trod upon , free speech and free press  being stifled (there are protesters being stomped on at Wall Street as I make this reply ,whose protest went on for almost two weeks before the press in general began to cover it) and the general dumbing down of the general populace.

We feel that people want to see entertainment that also stimulates their mind, and has something to say on the human condition .  Another show we are looking at is a piece I directed 10 years ago called The Crimson Thread, which deals with women's issues, as well as unions, in a brilliant funny and touching fashion . 

What’s is like working with the playwright on this production.  What is his involvement?

We contacted him directly and he could not be nicer.  The play has been done rarely since the 1978 tour, so we hope our production will bring attention to this funny and touching piece.

Right now, we are trying to raise funds for the theatre company. If anyone wants to make a donation they can go to http://www.fracturedatlas.org/site/fiscal/profile?id=4274. Donations from $5 to $5000 can be made via credit card through Fractured Atlas, and are tax deductible. 

Also, on November 18th, Sentimental Journey is performing at the TRIAD in NYC. Parts of the proceeds will go to benefit TETCNY's fundraiser campaign. You can learn more here at: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=270582946306137.  Also, people can visit our Web page at www.tetcny.org. 

We’re looking for new members and contributors, as well as a Director of Development and a Web Site Designer.  Anyone interested can contact me through the Web site.

Thank you, Kevin!