Pictured Mark Rylance as the widow Olivia (left) and Michael Brown as Viola.
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Playwright: William Shakespeare
At: Chicago Shakespeare Theater,
Navy Pier
Phone: (312) 595-5600; $65-$75
Runs through: Dec. 14
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In one of its more exciting and true-to-the-spirit-of-the-Bard moves, Chicago Shakespeare Theater has imported the considerable talents of London's Globe Theatre to its mainstage to perform Twelfth Night. The play, with its crossed-wire love connections, a pair of twins separated by a shipwreck, drunken fools, and more is madcap, bawdy, hugely funny, and one of Shakespeare's most accessible works. Twelfth Night revolves around Viola and Sebastian, twins whom a shipwreck have separated, washing them up in Illyria, an almost mystical land that, paradoxically, contains the same foibles and yearnings as our own, or anyone's, for that matter. Viola meets—and is smitten by—the handsome Orsinio, for whom she begins work disguised as a male courier. Her job is to deliver messages to the widow Olivia, who has no interest in Orsinio, because she is quite taken with his courier. And so grows the tangled branches upon which Shakespeare hangs some of his funniest lines, and one of his most clever and fast-paced plots.
The Globe Theatre, as one might expect, gives this production its definitive look and style. That's because the company has opted to stage it as closely as possible as it would have been in Shakespeare's time. Handmade costumes, a sextet of Elizabethan musicians, and an all-male cast of 13 harken back to its original production before Queen Elizabeth I at the Middle Temple Hall in 1602. If that production was anything like this shimmering jewel, the Queen and the crowds who came to see Twelfth Night must have been pleased indeed.
Director (or Master of Play), Tim Carroll has wisely kept things simple in terms of set so that the performances, which are stellar, can sparkle all the more brightly. In one of the finest interpretations of Shakespeare I've ever seen, Mark Rylance as the widow Olivia, is astonishingly good. Rylance glides across the stage as if he has casters hidden beneath his flowing black dresses, dignified and comical all at the same time. His geisha-like countenance bears all that goes on around Olivia with a cockeyed grace: the antics of drunken Uncle Toby Belch, the buffoonish capering of Malvolio, and the misplaced attraction for Viola in disguise. Rylance handles all of this and more with a delicacy and a real feel for comedy, making this 400-year-old character utterly his own. But all of the actors here acquit themselves admirably. Bill Stewart is in pull-out-all-the-stops comic form here as Sir Toby Belch; Timothy Walker's Malvolio, with the character's ridiculous designs on Olivia, is a comic gem. And Michael Brown as Viola, a man playing a woman pretending to be a man, never misses a step. Liam Brennan's Scottish brogue adds color and shading to an already accomplished performance as the love-crossed Duke Orsinio.
It's all great fun. A time machine couldn't transport you better back to Elizabethan days, and the magic and mayhem of this Twelfth Night.