Twelfth Night Play Review

On Wednesday 3/04/2019 Cheshire Academy students from the department of English and Art science had an opportunity to visit Yale School of Drama at Repertory theatre, where we watched a play called Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare. This excellent production was formed by James Bundy who is the Artistic Director. This play had many great performers and actors that revealed the plot and the pure soul of the play. Since the play was transformed into something modern and very creative, the actors performed their roles in the best way they could. My applause goes to : Abubakr Ali ( Sir Andrew Aguecheek), Erron Crawford ( Feste ), William DeMeritt (  Orsino ), Denzel Fields ( Ensemble ), Allen Gilmore ( Malvolio ), Tiffany Denise Hobbs ( Olivia ), Moses Ingram ( Viola ), Wesley T, Jones ( Ensemble), Manu Kumasi ( Antonio ), Chivas Michael ( Sir Toby ), Ilia Isorelys Paulino ( Maria ), Stephon Pettway ( Ensemble ), and others.

Twelfth Night is a story based on love and happiness, the main priority for William Shakespeare was to create a romantic comedy that sometimes can remind of Romeo and Julieta, however, comes from a different period and has a happy end. Because this play was transformed drastically, I could see that the main priority for the actors was to deliver happiness to the audience with a portion of love. However, while watching the play, I could see that for most of the time love was a distraction and cause pain for the characters. Throughout the play, the main characters were genuinely suffering from love and the confusion/consequences that it brought. At the end of the story, we could see that love as a feeling can give happiness and destroy hearts as well, which did happen throughout the stories because of the misunderstanding between characters.

 The plot of the story is based on two siblings Viola and Sebastian being on the ship that crashed and due to the damages that killed all the passengers and the crew besides the brother and sister made both of them think that they were long gone. Captain of the ship disguises Viola as a boy and sends her to enter the service of Orsino. Viola falls in love with Orsino knowing that it will not work due to their statues and the fact that she presented herself as a boy. While her brother Sebastian after the crash of the ship arrives in Illyria with the help of the captain of the ship by the name Antonio. Throughout the play, both characters have no idea that each of them is alive and with no hope stop searching for each other. However, due to their identical looks, after multiple opportunities to find each other life finally puts them in the same spot in where both families find their love and finally realise all the difficulties that happened in the end.

 The staging in this play was incredible and modern; it reminded me of the production of our generation, as it was said some of the production and the cast came from the movie Black Panther. Staging director used all the resources to deliver proper content and valuable staging material which made this play so good. The determination that was put into the costumes the projector, music and other little details are valuable. The scream that projects some of cartoons themes throughout the performance played a significant role in the reaction and feeling of the audience, what made this play so contrasting.

Throughout the play, I had one character that impressed me and entertained me through the story is Feste ( Fool ), A character who was created to entertain even in the story everyone called him to fool. He was originally from Olivia's household; however, throughout the story moved between both household Orsino and Olivia’s. His job is to make fun of people and make a joke and sing, and he was also known for giving quality and helpful bits of advice to people when needed. He became my favourite character due to all characteristics that he had while playing his character it was phenomenal; he is funny talented and the autotune that he used while singing just impressed me as well as it did with the rest of the audiences.

 I have seen multiple productions in a variety of countries and culture, that were created by well-known directors and with very talented and famous casts. However, I have never seen anything like this performance, and it had everything decent cast, production, staging and the props. Overall this performance impressed me, and I hope I will have an opportunity to see that cast performing again.