Читать книгу Twelfth Night - William Shakespeare - Страница 12

For their 2012–13 tour, Propeller revived their pairing of Twelfth Night and The Taming of the Shrew, first seen in 2006–7.

These plays present families in crisis and each puts domesticity under the spotlight. The image of home, something we cherish and regard as a sanctuary, provides a scenic framework to present both plays. Olivia’s household is air space for a family suspended in the holding pattern of liminal mourning, stalked by deadpan satirical comedians and uncles preferably edged out of family snapshots. For me it conjures the existential books, films and dramas of the 1950s, of the Parisian chic intelligentsia of Cocteau or Sartre. The perfect reference point 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