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The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 17.0996  Sunday, 12 November 2006

From: 		Al Magary <al@magary.com>
Date: 		Thursday, 09 Nov 2006 22:31:17 -0800
Subject: 	How *does* Shakespeare play in another language? A Russian 
'Twelfth Night' in NY

Shakespeare in That Universal Language: Theater
By BEN BRANTLEY
New York Times, November 9, 2006

http://theater2.nytimes.com/2006/11/09/theater/reviews/09twel.html

Boundaries melt like ice cubes in August in the Chekhov International 
Theater Festival's blissful production of "Twelfth Night," which runs 
through Sunday at the Harvey Theater of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. 
Lines traditionally relied upon to separate sexes, scenes, senses and, 
for that matter, languages dissolve into a mist of theatrical 
enchantment in this all-male Russian-speaking interpretation of 
Shakespeare's tale of identities under siege in the land of Illyria.

There may be moments when, like the play's love-bewitched characters, 
you'll feel like slapping your brow to dislodge the clouds of 
disorientation crowding your head. While the drag accoutrements are 
minimal, there are times when you suddenly remember, with a breathless 
"oh," that the lithe young woman dressed as a boy is first of all, yes, 
a man.

And how can it be that you find yourself thinking you have rarely heard 
the sense of Shakespeare rendered with such enlightening exactness and 
musicality, when the words you're listening to are not remotely like 
English, Elizabethan or otherwise?

A bit of advice, per Shakespeare: stop trying to analyze, and surrender 
to the stream of sensations. As one character in the play wisely 
counsels, "If it be thus to dream, then let me sleep." When your guides 
are as magically accomplished as Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod, the 
British artists who created Cheek by Jowl and are this show's director 
and designer, you can truly go with the flow with no fear of drowning.

To many theatergoers the idea of hearing Shakespeare in anything other 
than its original tongue is akin to watching ballet performed by 
inanimate statues. The play may be the thing, but in Shakespeare, the 
words - with all their distinctively English textures and sounds - make 
the play. Don't they?

The glorious surprise of this "Twelfth Night" - which made its debut in 
Moscow, has since toured Europe (it was the hot ticket in London when I 
was there this summer) and moves on from New York for an American tour 
that includes stops in Arizona, Chicago and California - is in how it 
finds an alchemical substance in Shakespeare that transcends the verbal.

At first I was distracted by the telegraphic nature of the supertitles. 
But Mr. Donnellan and Mr. Ormerod, who have been working with Russian 
theater companies since 1997, make the heretical case that the essence 
of Shakespeare isn't exclusively linguistic. The words, it seems, are 
but steppingstones to a universal pattern of images and insights about 
human behavior and the perplexing world that thwarts and shapes it. 
Shakespeare's first language, it would seem, is not English, after all; 
it's Theater.

Anyone who saw the Cheek by Jowl productions of "As You Like It" or 
Webster's "Duchess of Malfi" at the Brooklyn Academy in the 1990s knows 
how disarmingly fluent Mr. Donnellan and Mr. Ormerod are in the language 
of theater, and how seductively they can reintroduce you to its most 
basic vocabulary.

This "Twelfth Night" (like the Cheek by Jowl "As You Like It") begins 
with its raw clay yet to be molded. The entire company assembles on a 
blank white stage, men dressed identically in black pants and white 
shirts. A few words are spoken among them, words technically belonging 
to the play's heroine, Viola, and plucked (with slight distortion) from 
the center of the text: "I am all the daughters of my fathers,/And all 
the brothers. Yet I know not."

This resonant declaration of what a puzzle a person is assumes immediate 
physical life when one young man is descended upon by the other actors 
and wrapped in a black skirt. This actor, Andrey Kuzichev, looks a bit 
baffled at first. But when next we see him, in a golden sheath, he is 
Viola, the shipwrecked daughter of a noble house, and we are not about 
to question Mr. Kuzichev's right to be her. This simple theatrical 
metamorphosis becomes a template for all that follows, as the play 
unfolds in a succession of movements from resistance - to love, to 
compassion, to understanding - toward surrender.

The story flows with a liquidness I've rarely seen matched in 
productions of Shakespeare, with the action between scenes overlapping 
onstage. If this sounds confusing, it isn't, thanks in part to Mr. 
Ormerod's exquisite use of space- and mood-defining lighting. But 
clarity also comes from the explicit physical characterizations of each 
performer, from the straight-backed class-conscious stances of the noble 
Olivia (Alexey Dadonov) and her suitor, the Count Orsino (Vladimir 
Vdovichenkov), to the disjointed Cubist angularity of the revelers Sir 
Toby Belch (Alexander Feklistov) and Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Dmitry Dyuzhev).

Mr. Kuzichev's fine-tuned interpretation of a woman trying to assume a 
man's mien is on a level of its own.

That poses and postures can be feigned and broken is of course one of 
the lessons of "Twelfth Night." The theme is given its most literal life 
in the transformation of Olivia's priggish steward Malvolio (Dmitry 
Shcherbina) into a slavering, clothes-discarding animal, when his 
overweening ambition gets the best of him.

But this production also makes more pervasive, and oddly haunting, 
merriment of the notion of identity as a game of hide-and-seek. When 
Viola, disguised as a page boy, first visits Olivia, the members of the 
countess's court don black veils and wander like ghosts among columns of 
fabric. And it occurs to you, for one dizzy second, that any of them 
could be Olivia.

The same sense of flux is given ecstatically funny form in the duel 
between the disguised Viola and the craven Sir Andrew. And the climactic 
moment in which the knot of confusions and deceptions is finally untied 
is staged as a circling, wondering carousel of movement.

Every so often, though, the action freezes to allow Viola and, later, 
her twin, Sebastian (Sergey Mukhin), to step forward in moments of 
revelation, to observe (to the sound of tolling bells) that there indeed 
may be order in this chaos.

Music plays the essential role it must, with songs (by Vladimir Pankov 
and Alexander Gusev) that shift from nightclub brassiness to 
gut-plumbing sadness. (Watch the seamless changes of mood in the 
drinking scene enacted by Toby, Andrew and the wily lady-in-waiting 
Maria, played by Ilia Ilyin.)

Many of the numbers are performed by Feste the clown (Igor Yasulovich), 
who has some of the epicene drollness (though little of the creepiness) 
of the M.C. from "Cabaret." In his powder-white makeup and jester's 
motley, Feste seems to exist somewhere between the sexes and classes, an 
embattled point of equilibrium in a world of extremes.

But you are never allowed to forget entirely the silence behind the 
revelry, nor the darkness that always waits to succeed the sun. Both 
acts end with a simple coup de théâtre, achieved by an abrupt change of 
lighting, that reminds us that the line between pleasure and pain, 
between happiness and despair, is also flexible. That acknowledged, any 
theatergoer's feelings when this ravishing production concludes are 
likely to be as close to undiluted pleasure as this ambiguous old world 
allows.

TWELFTH NIGHT

By William Shakespeare; directed by Declan Donnellan; performed in 
Russian with English titles; designed by Nick Ormerod; lighting by 
Judith Greenwood; assistant director, Evgeny Pisarev; choreographer and 
movement consultant, Jane Gibson; movement director, Albert Alberts; 
movement coach, Alexandra Konnikova; music by Vladimir Pankov and 
Alexander Gusev; stage manager, Olga Vasilevskaya. A Chekhov 
International Theater Festival of Moscow production, presented by the 
2006 Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Karen Brooks 
Hopkins, president; Joseph V. Melillo, executive producer. At the BAM 
Harvey Theater, 651 Fulton Street, Fort Greene, (718) 636-4100. Through 
Sunday. Running time: 2 hours, 35 minutes.

WITH: Vladimir Vdovichenkov (Orsino), Sergey Mukhin (Sebastian), Mikhail 
Zhigalov (Antonio), Vsevolod Boldin (a sea captain), Yury Makeev 
(Valentine), Mikhail Dementiev (Curio), Alexander Feklistov (Sir Toby 
Belch), Dmitry Dyuzhev (Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Dmitry Shcherbina 
(Malvolio), Igor Yasulovich (Feste), Alexey Dadonov (Olivia), Andrey 
Kuzichev (Viola) and Ilia Ilyin (Maria).

_______________________________________________________________
S H A K S P E R: The Global Shakespeare Discussion List
Hardy M. Cook, editor@shaksper.net
The S H A K S P E R Web Site <http://www.shaksper.net>

DISCLAIMER: Although SHAKSPER is a moderated discussion list, the 
opinions expressed on it are the sole property of the poster, and the 
editor assumes no responsibility for them.

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