THE 1HEATRE
4, Twelfth Night." At the Arts Theatre.
THAT the new theatrical venture at the Arts Theatre is well worth the fullest support of anyone interested in a lively contemporary theatre, has already been proved by the production of Awake and Sing—already noticed in these columns, and due for a welcome extra season which begins on June 23rd. It is therefore with no desire to cramp Alec Clunes' style, or to denigrate his pioneering work, that one is forced to refer in less than lukewarm terms to his treatment of Twelfth Night. Any play whose alternative title is What You Will must be a temptation to the producer, and Mr. Clones has certainly seized on the double gilt.of this opportunity.
In the Climes version, then, the play opens with a spotlit Feste in front of the curtain and as Shakespeare wrote nothing for Feste to say at that point, the jester can do no more than withdraw, leaving the curtain to rise on Act I, Scene 2, " The Sea Coast." Enter a sailor, who makes a prolonged and cautious reconnaissance in dumb show before the entry of Viola and the Captain. None of this seems to have any real relevance to the play ; and one may be pardoned, perhaps, for preferring Shakespeare's method of plunging us straight into Orsino's opening soliloquy.
But no sooner have we settled down to the comfortable assurance that Jean Forbes Robertson is as good as "Viola as we had hoped, than we are faced with the first Sir Toby scene, which sets the key for the rest of the comedy. It is, apparently, to be regarded as a work by Tchekov rather than by Shakespeare, and very bril- liantly has Mr. Clones carried it off—in a purely Tchekovian sense. Even the drunk Scene, despite Denys Blakelock's masterly Aguecheek and Joyce Redman's full-blooded Maria, proceeds with remote, slow and twilit tread towards a hangover which Shakespeare—bless him—left firmly out of his script. Perhaps the trouble here lies in Mr. Chines' own reading of Feste, whom he plays as a character fit to out-melancholy Jacques himself.
It is perhaps understandable that a so-often produced play like Twelfth Night should be a temptation to any producer as regards new readings, and no one will seriously challenge—even if they cannot wholeheartedly applaud—the use of a pocket-diary by Olivia (very well -played by Vivienne Bennett) after Cesario's " Farewell, fair cruelty." And it is, paradoxically, well within convention to underplay the relations between Antonio and Sebastian, although by doing so the shape of the play as a whole is damaged. But, on the whole, Mr. Clones has done no more than present us with a simulacrum of Shakespeare seen in a clouded mirror.
It should be added that Walter Hudd, treading alone and aloof, gives us a really terrific Malvolio, and that Rolf Gerard's decor— notably Orsino's court—is quite delightful to look upon. Nor, in general, need the Arts Theatre be ashamed of having presented a very courageous, if unsuccessful, experiment. For experiment is, one hopes, at the top of their list of responsibilities to an all-too-
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