By William Shakespeare; Bell Shakespeare Company; The Arts Centre; Until September 18
Review, Cameron Woodhead
I HAVE a sister. Just weeks before Black Saturday, she moved into a house in Kinglake with her partner and six-month-old son. For a few, terrifying hours, as the inferno swept through, we lost mobile contact.
It's an experience I couldn't get out of my head as I watched the latest Bell Shakespeare production, Twelfth Night.
Director Lee Lewis's hilarious, vital and accessible production transforms the disaster that precipitates the play's action from a shipwreck (in which a brother and a sister both believe the other has died) to a bushfire.
Lewis's conceit is that the play is being put on by a community of bushfire survivors. An enormous mound of donated clothes dominates the stage. A TV, rippling with white noise, blares with grave news snippets. From the darkness, torchlight. There's a cry from Andrea Demetriades - our soon-to-be Viola - of pure and reverberate despair.
A portable light is switched on, and Max Cullen salvages a battered tome from the wreckage. It's Shakespeare. He begins to read. One by one, haltingly, the survivors follow suit. For a fearful moment, you think that this will be a mangled, artless Shakespeare. Then the actors flick a magic switch. By degrees, hesitation gives way to an effortless command of verse. The characters leap brazenly forth. Kinglake becomes Illyria.
Some of the directorial decisions Lewis makes aren't to my taste. Her overzealous pruning cuts various ambiguities and shadow lines from the text.
Yet I'd rather see a lively, irreverent production of Shakespeare than a ''traditional'' one that's dead on the stage, and this one is meticulously directed and brilliantly acted. It's animated by a desperate, irrepressible humour.
The scene where Maria (Brent Hill), Sir Toby (Adam Booth) and Sir Andrew (Elan Zavelsky) trick Malvolio (Ben Wood) with a love-letter is exemplary.
I have no doubt that Demetriades will be a big star. The purity and intelligence of her Viola is utterly winning. Cullen's Feste radiates gentleness and a quiet effulgence, and Kit Brookman - the boy playing Olivia - brings a bright-eyed impishness to the gender-bending. Zavelsky comes close to stealing the show.
The play ends with the survivors re-emerging, leaving the stage to a static-ridden TV blurting out cautious messages of hope in the face of destruction.