On Friday, November 1st, the University of Notre Dame hosted a preshow lecture and performance of Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night (1602) at the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center, Patricia George Decio Theatre. Sponsored by the Nanovic Institute, Actors From The London Stage and Shakespeare at Notre Dame hosted a special presentation in the Art and Scholarship of Academic Storytelling series. The preshow lecture featured postdoctoral research associate Dr. Jenny T. Birkett in conversation with the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Artistic Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame, Scott Jackson. Their conversation centered on the theme of “storytelling” in Shakespeare.
Zay Dale, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the University of Notre Dame, has written a summary of the talk and the performance for the readers of EITW.
Shakespeare in Indiana
Dr. Birkett began the introductory lecture with a discussion on what makes Shakespeare so captivating. She explained that Shakespeare demands two things from the audience: imagination and attention. The plays demand our imagination not only because we are positioned in this world beyond our own, but it demands we use our imagination to understand how and why actors decide to perform a role in a given manner. Regarding the idea of “attention” in following this play, Dr. Birkett noted the distinction between “hearing a play” vs “seeing a play,” and argued that they are equally important. Each time you watch a Shakespeare play, she continues, you notice “something slightly different, slightly new.” Indeed, this performance of Twelfth Night from Actors From The London Stage offered a unique approach to this Shakespearean play. Scott Jackson, the Mary Irene Ryan Family Executive Director of Shakespeare at Notre Dame, then began a discussion on how this play would have been performed in the seventeenth century and the importance of this type of performance. Jackson pointed out how Actors From The London Stage did not have a formal “director” that guided them with this performance. Rather, the performers were tasked with deciding, as a collective, who would play what role. Jackson acknowledged the rarity of Shakespeare in grand productions and talked about the importance of “just the story and essential props.” With the goal of
“bringing Shakespeare to our society and not our society to Shakespeare,”
Jackson and Dr. Birkett finished this preshow lecture with a certain level of excitement for a comedic play that will be enacted with only props and no immense or grand production.
The staging
The cast only consisted of five actors playing all the roles in this play. Thus, a distinctive element in this performance of Twelfth Night was the double embodiment played by many of the actors, as every performer interpreted two or more characters in the play. Shona Babayemi played Olivia, Maria, and the Officers. Sarah Finigan played Toby, Antonio, and Valentine. Sam Jenkins-Shaw played Orsino, Feste, Fabian, and a Servant. Thuliswa Magwaza played Viola and Sebastian. Finally, Hayden Wood played Malvolio, Sir Andrew, Curio, a Priest, and a Sea Captain.
We are granted an original temporal perspective on the staging of the play through the artistic choices of scenery and props. The setting is minimalistic, presenting only a few stage items to the audience, and the scene is set within a square and some surrounding chairs so that the characters who are not in the scene can sit on them. We experience, therefore, both the stage and the backstage at once.
On the Plot
The play begins with Sam Jenkins-Shaw as Orsino, the Duke of Illyria professing his love for the Countess Olivia who has sworn to stay at home as she mourns the death of her brother and rejects Orsino. Later in the play, a group of sailors arrive on shore with Viola. We see the first usage of props in the play when Sarah Finigan and Hayden Wood showcase rain and thunder to the viewers. The rain and thunder signify that there was trouble in the waters. Here, we see Thuliswa, who plays Viola and Sebastian, switch from the female Viola to the disguised male Cesario, to which Thuliswa changes her outfit to stage this gendered switch from Viola to Cesario. Similarly, later in the play, Thuliswa will don a hat to signify her switch from Viola/Cesario to her brother Sebastian when she disguises herself to work for Duke Orsino. One of the first moments of this double embodiment that this production showcased, beyond Viola’s switch to Cesario, was Shona Babayemi switching from the role of marries to her servant Maria and vice versa. This change is less about Shona’s looks as she stays in the same outfit she uses for Olivia. What Shona changes, however, is the tone of her voice and her mannerisms. Her voice is much more pronounced, confident, and deep when she plays the rich Countess Olivia. She also keeps a fan and moves with confidence and elegance manifesting openly to the audience the different social backgrounds and attitudes of the two characters. Further highlighting her switch from Olivia to Maria, Shona also moves from one side of the stage to another and looks in the direction of where the character would be.
Cesario, Viola in disguise, begins to work for Orsino, who sends Cesario to Olivia to woo her on his behalf. When Cesario and Olivia first meet, there is a pause in action. Olivia then showcases an interest in Cesario through her facial expressions, which caused much laughter from the audience. As the performance goes on, Cesario leaves the scene, and Olivia sends Malvolio, Hayden Wood, to give Cesario a ring. We are then introduced to the key comedic figures in this play—Feste, Sir Toby Belch, and Sir Andrew Aguecheek. The drunken Sir Toby and Sir Andrew discuss Sir Andrew’s affection for Olivia which leads to Sir Toby fleecing him of his money. The entire group despises the pompous Malvolio (who dons a pair of glasses to make him look much more serious than Hayden Wood’s other roles, like Sir Andrew) and so conspires to make him look like a fool in front of Olivia. They leave a forged letter for Malvolio to find, and he thinks the letter is written by Olivia who meant to profess her love for him. Malvolio decides to follow the letter and wears yellow stockings and a fishnet shirt while maintaining a funny and terrifying smile. On account of this, and as the audience laughs at the absurdities of the whole scene, Olivia sends him to be locked up in the dark. Here, the production uses prop lighting and a blindfold to show the audience that he is locked away in the darkness as Feste jokes with him.
We are later met with Viola’s brother Sebastian who has survived the shipwreck that happened at the beginning of the play. To play Viola, Cesario, and Sebastian, Thuliswa dons a backward hat to let the audience know that she is now Sebastian. Sarah Finigan plays Antonio and possesses an arm sleeve, and a more serious demeanor to show that she is now Antonio instead of Sir Toby. Again, attention to the minute details like textiles is very important for Actors From The London Stage. Sir Andrew challenges Cesario (who is Viola) to a duel. Antonio, who is already a wanted man, intervenes in this fight and defends Cesario because he believes Cesario is Sebastian, which leads to Antonio’s arrest. Olivia also is a part of this double-bodied confusion as she marries Sebastian, thinking that he is Cesario. Once it is revealed that Cesario and Sebastian are twins, the play begins to reach its conclusion. Because Cesario (or Viola) and Sebastian are played by the same person, Thuliswa uses Sebastian's hat to showcase the difference between the two characters. She also moves from one spatial position of the play to another (while another character holds her hat suspended in the air to showcase where Sebastian once stood). Toward the end, Malvolio is freed from the dark chamber and promises revenge on everyone. The play ends with a declaration of marriage between Duke Orsino and Viola as Feste sings a song to bring the play to its comedic conclusion.
Though being tasked with the difficulty of playing more than two characters, sometimes present simultaneously in the scenic action, Actors From The London Stage demonstrated what it means to bring Shakespeare to our world and what it means to rely on the audience to be able to join in and be participants of the play Twelfth Night.
On the Author
Zay Dale is a Ph.D. candidate and a recipient of a University Presidential Fellowship in Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Notre Dame. He studies Black radical theory and the aesthetics of Black violence in early to mid-20th-century literary texts. Some questions that guide Zay’s research are:
- Do we get restorative justice through the aesthetics of Black violence?
- Where do the facts of Black death and fiction meet?
- How does the fact of Black death bleed into its fictionalization?
- What is the distinction between Black violent form and content in literature?
- Does Black death have to be qualified as a spectacle once its narrative is reclaimed by Black people?
- Can Black violence be understood as un/gendered? Why do we need to transmute Black death into literature?
- What is the distinction between violence of the skin and violence of flesh, or violence of the physical and violence of the metaphysical?
Beyond this, Zay also studies how textiles condition Black existence. His work studies eighteenth and nineteenth-century textiles in relation to fugitive Black beings during slavery.
Originally published by at eitw.nd.edu on November 19, 2024.