Shakespeare, the Remix

Twelfth Night, or What You Will. 

Or What Tim Supple Will. Shakespeare's witty comedy, featuring some of the Bard's supplest lines, is drained of any vim, vigor, or vivacity in this dreary made-for-TV production.

Distributed as a double-feature with Michael Bogdanov's Macbeth (reviewed here), Twelfth Night is worth a spin for its eye-candy production design, committed performances, and occasionally interesting conceits. For the most part, however, it's a slow-going, humorless affair. 

Like Bogdanov's Macbeth, Baz Luhrmann's Romeo and Juliet (1996), or Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000), Supple updates Twelfth Night to a contemporary setting, mixing guns, mix CDs, and surveillance camera systems with the Bard's playful plotline of cross-dressing, mistaken identities, and "midsummer madness." The text is considerably condensed to fit a 110 minute time-slot, though one may discover remnants of the original story buried beneath the wreckage.

Sebastian (Ronny Jhutti) and Viola (Parminder Nagra), are brother and sister stowaways separated during a raid on a ship. Picked up by a fishing crew, Viola ends up ashore at Illyria, governed by the duke of Orsino (Chiwetel Ejiofor). Assuming her brother to be lost, Viola disguises herself as a man and enters Orsino's service. He employs her as his romantic emissary to a frigid noblewoman, Olivia (Claire Price), who is in mourning for the recent death of her brother. She rejects Orsino but in the process takes a fancy to the  messenger-Viola- disguised-as-boy and her icy exterior begins to melt.

Sounds like a charming set-up for a winning comedy of errors, no? Yes, absolutely, if you were watching nearly any other version of Twelfth Night. Tim Supple, perhaps frustrated in a desire to direct King Lear, makes the inexplicable aesthetic choice to suck Twelfth Night of any trace of humor. I am at a loss to understand why. Yes, the Malvolio subplot has a melancholy air about it, but most of the scenes are knee-slapping funny when given the right treatment. Supple & co. don't bother mining for comic gold (the play is the paylode), they don't even pick up the pickaxes. Some foolproof scenes, such as Malvolio appearing to Olivia in yellow stockings, cross-gartered--a scene so surefire funny any halfway decent high school production earns belly laughs-are plodding, heavy-handed, and about as funny as a migraine in this version.

The largely charismatic, multicultural cast is left to flounder in the void. Parminder Nagra, a charmer in Bend it like Beckham, tries admirably to generate heat but only succeeds in appearing vaguely pissed off. With her flipped-up hairdo, petulant mouth, and attractively oval face, she hardly convinces as a young man--she more closely resembles what she is: a girl dressed in her brother's clothes. Chiwetel Ejiofor commands as Orsino, but doesn't seem to be playing a character so much as modeling a series of designer fashion lines--there's Casual Duke, Sporty Duke, and Mob-Boss Duke, for starters. I'd like to see him in a meatier production, playing Henry V perhaps, or Marc Antony.

Orsino listens to CD mixes labeled "Music by the Fool," and I couldn't help but wish the duke had chosen better background music. If "Music by the Fool" be the food of love, I've lost my appetite. Zubin Varla plays Feste as a sixties-style troubadour always threatening to pick up a guitar. His voice is pleasing and he has a nice finger-picking touch on the guitar, but the songs are glaringly out-of-place. They're painfully sincere cry-in-your-beer ballads that inspire embarrassed laughter any time he reaches for the six-string. When he does, Supple discordantly shifts into music-video mode and whatever momentum he'd managed to get going comes to a grinding halt.

Modern accoutrements such as the music-video interludes feel like embellishments on a flimsy structure. In 1996's Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann matched his headlong, head-rush, acid-trip visual style to a story of equally impetuous young lovers caught up in a whirlwind tragedy-romance of operatic proportion. With Twelfth Night, Supple's camera trickery, claustrophobic close-ups, vivid set designs, and dancey soundtrack all seem like unnecessary flourishes, but at least they hold the audience's attention while the actors are obliged to declaim Shakespeare's lines like mournful funeral-goers. 

But who knows, perhaps we can look forward to Mr. Supple directing a rollicking, rolling-in-the-aisles funny adaptation of Titus Andronicus?

I would encourage anyone to check out Trevor Nunn's version from 1996, starring the delightful Imogen Stubbs as Viola and piquant Helena Bonham Carter as Olivia. Though Nunn also emphasized some of the play's melancholy undertones, he did not neglect opportunities for diverting comedy.