Celebrating Twelfth Night under the Raj

Play Number 3 at the Stratford Festival this week was Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. I've already blogged about the functions of time and the trickster in this work, so I naturally watched the performance with those elements in mind. Actor Dana Green played very well the role of Viola as trickster.

Director Leon Rubin and designer John Pennoyer set the production in nineteenth-century India, under the British Raj. One of the play's two households, that of the countess Olivia, was made up of British characters; the other, that of the duke Orsino (played by Sanjay Talwar), was made up of Indians. The music alternated between British and Indian styles.

The twins, Viola and Sebastian, were played as English, but on separately being shipwrecked in Illyria, they both adopted Indian dress. The result was twofold. The loose costumes and turbans made the twins look much more alike (a crucial plot element) than in any other production of Twelfth Night I've seen. And in Viola's case, the cultural shift nicely reinforced the gender shift.