A programme note reminds us Twelfth Night on the Christian calendar, the feast of the Epiphany, brings days of feasting and revels to their climax with “intense merriment, misrule and confusion”. And although this happens in the northern hemisphere’s winter, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night is abounds in references to spring and summer, allowing it to sit “perfectly in a New Zealand context.”

Add the ambience of an art gallery opening (we are invited to arrive early at re.SPACE to view the contemporary art exhibition amid which the comedy will play out) and the tone is set for Bright Orange Walls’ second summer Shakespeare in a Wellington city ‘found space’ (the first being A Midsummer Night’s Dream last year).

It is an exhibition opening that prompts the Duke Orsino’s “If music be the food of love, play on” and sends him to his studio to vent his blues on a canvas. The art works become part of the show at times and the presence of paint leads to an extraordinary rendition of Malvolio’s misguided attempt to impress his beloved mistress, the lady Olivia, with yellow stockings and cross-garters.

As directed by Samuel Phillips, the action flows – for just under two hours without an interval – in the seamless and sometimes unseemly rhythm of a drink-fuelled social event. Production Designer Harriet Denby serves the premise of the production by dressing the actors and the space fashionably and ideally.

All 11 actors claim their roles with a vocal and physical fluency that suggest playing Shakespeare is second nature to them. Almost nothing is forced; most interpretations and ‘gags’ seem to rise naturally from the text and the found-space setting. Time and again I find myself doubting that anyone in Stratford or London could play a given scene better for clarity of character, intention and meaning.

The arrival of Viola – played by Ella Hope-Higginson (also credited as the Creative Producer) – soaking wet and hammering at the building’s glass frontage, makes perfect sense here. She’s a refugee from “the wind and the rain” that is celebrated in the final song. Although we have to rely on our memories this balmy new year, no-one can blame the producers for thinking this could well have been the norm in Wellington’s January.

The whole conceit of Viola becoming Cesario and being seen as a desirable young man by Olivia (although Orsino does note “thy small pipe /Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound”) then being mistaken for her twin brother Sebastian, and he in turn for Caesario, happily plays out as an unblinking challenge for us to suspend our disbelief – and because they do, we do.

Jonathan Price’s fashionably lovelorn and melancholy artist, Orsino, is exquisitely balanced by Brynley Stent’s fashionably mourning but truly lustful Olivia.

Andrew Patterson and Adam Brown respectively wallow in the disrespectful hedonism of Sir Toby Belch, Olivia’s constantly quaffing free-loading uncle, and his very rich but dim, quarrelsome and cowardly friend, Sir Andrew Aguecheek – also enamoured of Olivia.

Johanna Cosgrove negotiates with alacrity the slide of Olivia’s lady’s maid, Maria, from professional ‘P A’ to fun-seeking crony of the knights and author of their scheme to knock Malvolio off his pompous pedestal.

Tom Clarke’s Malvolio fits perfectly into the pretentious level of the fine arts scene and he is very inventive within and beyond the text (as mentioned above). I have always felt, however, that the character is best completed when his gulling and imprisonment at the hands of Maria, Sir Toby and Sir Andrew – plus Feste masquerading as Sir Topaz the curate – strips bare the truly vulnerable man he has sought to protect by encasing himself in judgemental propriety. So more could be discovered here, I feel. 

Freya Sadgrove eschews the ‘old retainer’ aspect of Feste (who used to be Olivia’s father’s Fool) to reinvent her as a somewhat imperious and insightful friend given to speaking out where others may not. Her singing, strong and true, is valued by all – including us. Sadgrove fills in a range of incidental roles too, sometimes changing character, sometimes not. Shane Murphy’s Fabian also facilitates from offstage before participating then helping to resolve the plot.

Patrick Carroll’s Sebastian is strong and dynamic. Making his saviour Antonio female, played with open honesty by Comfrey Saunders, conjures with the historical idea of female pirates (and its contemporary port-town equivalent) while removing the interesting homo-erotic dimension of Antonio’s infatuation with Sebastian.

In duet, Saunders and Sadgrove put a sublime ending on proceedings with their harmonised rendition of the epilogue song: “The rain it raineth every day” – yeah right. Two hours – on not the most comfortable seating (backless school chairs or high bar stools) it has to be said – fly by as two banks of audience reflect each other’s delight. Those on one side see through to the street; those on the other see through an internal window that is judiciously incorporated.

Once more I have to note how lucky Wellington is to have such a wealth of young talent that three large-cast Shakespeare productions – Richard III (at Bats until 31 Jan), this Twelfth Night (every Thurs-Sun until 8 Feb) and Summer Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens (to open 13 Feb) – can be independently cast and produced in the same summer. For this we must give due credit to Shakespeare Globe Centre NZ’s annual University of Otago Sheilah Winn Shakespeare Festival, Long Cloud Youth Theatre (back when they included classical texts in their repertoire), Victoria University Theatre Department and Toi Whakaari: NZ Drama School.

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Last year Samuel Phillips directed a very funny A Midsummer’s Night Dream that was performed in an unpromising venue: a large abandoned retail space in Victoria Street. This year the company have crossed the road to a much smaller and a no more promising theatrical venue, the art gallery, re.SPACE.

The production of Twelfth Night takes the architectural features (a glass wall/a slanting steel supporting beam/ a half-hidden staircase) as well as one or two exhibits of a current exhibition on the walls and incorporates them into the comic fabric of the play. The only drawback to the use of the site is that the acoustics are not the best.

As the play’s dramaturg, Lori Leigh, points out in the programme Twelfth Night is a play “obsessed with visual and graphic representation: art (and artifice), posing, paintings, and pictures.”  

So Orsino is not only a lover of music but also a would-be artist; picture frames are used for disguises, and paint and paint brushes are used in a number of comically ingenious ways. The glass wall both reveals and hides characters. Malvolio races down the staircase to attend Olivia.

Despite a false fire alarm on opening night (it provided a brief interval in a production that wasn’t going to have one) and an unintentionally well-timed mobile phone ringing in the audience, the cast carried on with professional aplomb.

There are some highlights as memorable as the Dream’s fire extinguishers: the fight between Aguecheek and Viola is a free for all that is uproarious, and the sexual fantasises of Malvolio are revealed in a comic mime and his cross-gartered scene is both funny and disturbing in its intensity.

One aspect of the play, however, is diminished: the strain of melancholy that runs through the comedy (Feste/Antonio/Sebastian). However, my favourite melancholic line (Aguecheek: I was adored once too.) is turned into delightful comedy with Sir Toby’s amazement at the possibility of anyone ever having adored him.

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