for our scenic world surfaced early on in my design process, a film that had got under my skin thirty years ago, the enigmatic and claustrophobic black and white classic, L’année dernière à Marienbad.
Reference for Propeller’s designed world for Twelfth Night; Alan Resnais’ existential classic movie, L’année dernière à Marienbad.
Desaturated of colour, Feste’s followers, our masked chorus, put on a face, revel and delight in oiling the whirligig of time — they constitute the ‘pack’ that bedevils Malvolio and perhaps anyone else who dares to dream. They’re cool, sometimes menacing. Their clothes could be equally at home in a Tarantino movie.
The play asks us to reflect on the ironies of life and the characters are given chances to scrutinise their attitude to love in all its guises. Illyria is shaped and reshaped by the strangely absent adult generation’s wardrobes. After the possibility of childhood fables in amongst the mothballs, furs and dinner suits, encounters with lions and witches, the occupants have now degenerated into darker recesses where adolescents and young adults question themselves before engineering transformations and springing revelations. I look to the personas projected by twentieth-century artists. Their images and mythologies may have become more firmly fixed in our consciousness than the work they produce: René Magritte, Gilbert and George, Joseph Beuys, and others.
So…this Propeller project’s design brief is about morphing, introspection and celebration — an unusual mix of motivations: but isn’t that why we are continually fascinated by the themes that Shakespeare uniquely offers us to scrutinise, reinvent and make both visually and metaphorically meaningful for our own times?
Michael Pavelka
Screen capture of the computer aided design model for the set of Twelfth Night
Music in Twelfth Night
The opening line of Twelfth Night suggests that music will be important in the play. And the role of Feste, with four whole songs in the text and many other catches and rounds besides, is crucial in leading that music. We decided to use the traditional tunes for his songs, and our job as his ensemble of Zanies was to figure out how to accompany him.
On day one of rehearsals, Edward Hall and Michael Pavelka told us that one of their inspirations for the design of Propeller’s production was the French film, Last Year in Marienbad. When we watched it, we were struck by how the characters in that monochrome world were trapped in repetitive cycles, just as each character in Illyria is trapped in their own behavioural patterns until the shipwrecked twins enter their lives and begin to break the spell.
It occurred to me that musically we could represent this trapped, monochrome world by humming a single note, out of which Feste’s songs like ‘Come away death’ would emerge in a melancholic minor key, with the same cycle of minor chords repeated throughout the play; the effect of the twins on the musical landscape would be gradually to transform this minor atmosphere to the more contented major key of A flat, showing how the whole stagnant world of Illyria is transformed by these two outsiders. This idea formed the basis of most of my vocal arrangements. Our hummed C drone accompanies the opening lines, recurring throughout the play until, during the final song, the building tension of the C minor accompaniment slips away to leave a calm A flat major chord resonating in the theatre. Starting songs with all the cast joining in on a single note also ensures we are all in the same key!
Instrumentally, we were lucky the cast already played various folk instruments – guitars, clarinet, penny whistle, drums, accordion, with some brassy saxophone and a jazzy cello bass line thrown in for Toby and Maria’s mischievous antics. But Edward Hall also wanted to evoke an eerie horror film atmosphere, and we sourced some unusual percussion to achieve this: a piano gut was plucked like a harp, or hit like a drum for thunder during the shipwreck; glasses of water provide a buzzing drone under the Antonio and Sebastian scenes, along with a bottle blown like a distant foghorn; but our piece de resistance (and the instrument audiences always asked about) is the waterphone – a simple but surprisingly costly invention, consisting of a hollow metal cylinder with what looks like two dog bowls soldered on one end to form a container, with lots of thin metal rods of varying lengths protruding up from it: you pour water into the cylinder and bow the rods with a violin bow, whilst swaying the container to move the water around inside; and the resulting sound is all you need to send shivers down people’s spines!
Jon Trenchard
This Edition
Apart from a few minor emendations, this text is based closely on that in the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works (1623). There is one major change. In Scene 8, when Maria is planning her plot against Malvolio, she says ‘let the fool [i.e. Feste] make a third’ with Sir Toby and Sir Andrew. But in the event the ‘third’ is a new character, Fabian, who is abruptly introduced without any discernible motive (or gain). Our text removes Fabian completely, either cutting his speeches or re-allocating them to Sir Toby, Maria, or (wherever possible) Feste. The only other change affects Sir Toby’s extremely prolix speeches in the second half of the play: these have been trimmed somewhat.
We are very grateful to Angie Kendall for her help in preparing this edition.
Edward Hall and Roger Warren
Viola shipwrecked (2007)
Viola/Cesario: the ‘ring’ soliloquy (2012)
Maria, Sir Toby, Feste (2007)
Olivia and Viola (2012)
Feste (2012)
Malvolio and ‘Statues’ in the garden (2012)
Characters
FESTE
ORSINO, Duke of Illyria
CURIO, his servant
VIOLA, later Cesario
SEBASTIAN, her twin brother
A SEA CAPTAIN
OLIVIA
MALVOLIO, her steward
SIR TOBY BELCH, her uncle
MARIA, her gentlewoman
SIR ANDREW AGUECHEEK, suitor to Olivia
ANTONIO, a sea captain
A
