Twelfth Night. Shakespeare In The Squares.

Following last year’s well-received Tempest, touring theatre company Shakespeare In The Squares returns to London this summer, with an appealing production of Twelfth Night set to run across 22 different garden squares and outdoor venues. With little by way of artificial lighting or sound amplification and staging that barely goes beyond garden chairs and a few props, the show mostly relies on live Jazz-era songs and larger-than-life performances to make its mark. The result is a light and lively slice of “very midsummer madness”, one that neatly draws out the motif of ongoing insanity that marbles Shakespeare’s narrative.

Director Sioned Jones places the action in the 1920s, although the main cue to this is Emily Stuart’s glossy costume design (bobbed hair, flapper dresses, smoking jackets, and tweed suits) and some niftily arranged musical interludes from, amongst others, Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Fats Waller. The Muppet Show song gets a look-in, and there is even a bit of George Formby style, ukulele-plucking from the truly splendid Richard Emerson as Malvolio. The songs do not add a huge amount to the narrative drive, indeed occasionally there is something of the feel of a juke-box musical here. But the tunes are ably performed by a talented ensemble and bring some welcome pacing, particularly to a second half that just periodically threatens to run out of steam.

Lucy Ireland is great as the ship-wrecked Viola. She finds herself washed up in a ragged white dress on the coast of Illyria, apparently having lost twin brother Sebastian (Fred Thomas who doubles up as the naïve neophyte Sir Andrew Aguecheek) to the ravages of the sea. Disguising herself as Cesario (her bomber jacket, aviator hat, and pilot goggles bring a cherubic, boyish Biggles to mind) she becomes a trusted adviser in the court of handsome, love-struck Duke Orsino (Toby Gordon channelling Aiden Turner from Poldark).

Viola’s male camouflage proves a little too successful. Dispatched by Orsino to shake Olivia (a ruby-red lipped Carys McQueen) out of a funk of mourning, it is to Cesario’s adolescent delights that Olivia’s attention turns. Olivia wants Cesario. Viola desires Orsino, an emotion beautifully expressed in a seductive, flirting rendition by Ireland of Gershwin’s Someone To Watch Over Me. Orsino loves Olivia. Something has to give “and thus the whirligig of time brings in his revenges”.

It is in the production’s low plot that the best performances are to be found. Emerson captivates as Olivia’s pompous and scheming steward Malvolio. Attired as a butler straight out of Downton Abbey, the actor rolls deep-throated Rs as if he is jump-starting an aged moped in a church pulpit. Declaiming with the spoof energy of an am-dram Hamlet, his unalloyed joy on finding a cryptic love letter he mistakenly believes to be from Olivia provides the best comic scene of the show. His yellow satin shorts and yellow moccasins are sufficient to shock the audience into distraction; no wonder Olivia thinks him in need of imprisonment as a madman. Malvolio’s punishment, cruel as it is to see him have to listen to Who’s Sorry Now, feels entirely deserved in this production.

Marissa Landy impresses as fool Feste, outfitted in a golden dress and pink-striped garters. Casting a women as the fool is unusual but apt; a serving of gender-blind casting that dovetails neatly with the sexual ambiguity of the piece as a whole. Toby Gordon does not always manage the tricky transition between his twin roles as Orsino and the odious, wine-guzzling Sir Toby Belch. One sometimes has to check what Gordon is wearing to work out which character is on stage, leaving us speculating what Jones had in mind with casting the same actor in both parts. That said, his Belch is appropriately imposing. There is a haunting hint of Dicken’s Bill Sykes in the way he ensnares Thomas’ Aguecheek, whose boating jacket and straw boater puts one in mind of a public school prefect. Antonio (Lee Drage as a kind of ‘20s Del Boy figure) and Maria (Priscille Grace in a welcome Shakespeare debut) have less to do here but work hard.

Jones finishes the show with an ensemble version of Gershwin’s S’Wonderful. Her Twelfth Night is just that: a marvellous way to while away a balmy summer’s evening.

Writer: William Shakespeare

Director: Sioned Jones