Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.Music not only features in the opening lines of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night — “If music be the food of love, play on” — but also plays a key role in the plot. From the soulful strains that help Duke Orsino to work himself into a profound melancholy about his unrequited love, to the riotous drinking songs with which Toby Belch and Andrew Aguecheek draw the ire of Malvolio, music twists its way into the narrative. Tom Littler’s gorgeous production at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, set just after the second world war, responds to this beautifully, deftly placing music at the heart of this bittersweet comedy.Here a grand piano sits centre stage throughout and Feste becomes the pivot of the action, played by Stefan Bednarczyk not as a clown, but as a suave, Noël Coward-like entertainer, quick with a wise word or a wisecrack, but also always on hand to smoothen the mood or lift the spirits with an apt melody. It’s a wonderful idea, evoking with just a change of key the foggy confusion of the postwar years, where grief, loss and nostalgia do battle with hope, desire and the impulse to live. That tension is summed up not only in the action but in the set (Anett Black and Neil Irish), a cabinet full of liquor sharing the space with sombre memorial plaques to the fallen.This then is Illyria, where everyone is displaced emotionally and where Patricia Allison’s Viola, washed up after a fearful storm, reinvents herself in the image of the brother she believes lost in that tempest. Here everyone is at sea. Tom Kanji’s brooding Orsino devotes himself to his fruitless pursuit of the Lady Olivia (Dorothea Myer-Bennett), who in turn buries herself in deepest mourning to resist his advances. The arrival of a smart, sweet person of not quite determinate gender in their midst sends them into complete disarray.Littler’s cast pick their way nimbly through the confusions that ensue and use the intimacy of the space to great effect. Myer-Bennett is particularly funny as Olivia, throwing off her black satin with immoderate haste and conscripting the audience to help her seduce the disguised Viola. In the complementary subplot, with Olivia’s puritanical steward Malvolio tricked into believing that he is the object of his mistress’s desire, Clive Francis’s Sir Toby, Jane Asher’s Maria and Robert Mountford’s Andrew Aguecheek conceal themselves in the stalls to observe the impact of their subterfuge.The show is packed with delightful comic details. But it also draws out the dark streak of pain in the play. Oliver Ford Davies’s marvellous Malvolio is a punctilious dolt, but he’s also a deeply lonely person. He makes you really feel the cruelty of the joke practised upon him: the illusion that he might be loved. Mountford’s deliciously dozy Sir Andrew also catches the throat with his wistful reminiscence, “I was adored once too.” You feel keenly here the poignant ambivalence of the ending — the questions raised but not answered, the winners and the losers, the sense of pain patched over but not yet healed.★★★★☆To January 25, orangetreetheatre.co.uk
