Twelfth Night

Is it possible to display too lively an imagination? That seems an ungrateful accusation to throw at Edward Hall and his all-male Propeller Company, especially as both their Shakespeare revivals contain funny moments and boast excellent performances, notably from a young actor called Simon Scardifield, who switches from a notably fierce Kate in The Shrew to a hilariously feeble Aguecheek in Twelfth Night with the finesse of a fire-eater who can also juggle on the tightrope.

But each production is overbusy, at times distractingly so. When Bob Barrett’s gloriously vain Malvolio is being gulled with the fake love letter from Olivia, why must three men in dinner jackets be behind him, enacting “say, hear, speak no evil” with the traditional gestures? Why are actors in half-masks forever eavesdropping on the speakers? Why is there such an array of costumes in The Shrew? Why must the actors keep exiting through wardrobes?

But if there’s too much knockabout in The Shrew, and the Christopher Sly “induction” is cursorily and confusingly used, the transformation of the English tinker into the Italian aristocrat still works. It’s fashionable nowadays to follow Germaine Greer’s view that Petruchio is the sort of real man that strong, frustrated women need; but Dugald Bruce-Lockhart is refreshingly different, a coarse, swaggering fortune-hunter who treats Scardifield’s Kate with such brutal contempt that she ends up not merely abjuring her violence but succumbing to a case of Stockholm syndrome that leaves her half-compliantly, half-resentfully reduced to shattered resignation.

Twelfth Night is a richer play and comes off better, thanks to Jack Tarlton’s rapturous Orsino, Tony Bell’s wry Feste, Jason Baughan’s peppy little satyr of a Belch and Scardifield as an Aguecheek as limited, good-natured and eager to please as Bertie Wooster at a Drones Club bread-throwing session. The scene in which he has his abortive fight with Viola, here a boxing bout that could happily continue longer, is funnier than usual. But overall Tam Williams, who plays the disguised Viola, makes a plucky character too soft and tentative, and Bruce-Lockhart, who is now Olivia, does far too much precious wincing, arch wiggling and general palpitating.

That’s the danger when grown men take the roles originally played by boys. Women become exaggeratedly womanish. You have to admire Bruce-Lockhart from jumping from one gender extreme to another, but he parodies femininity — and that’s a problem Edward Hall needs to overcome if Propeller is to flourish.

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