Twelfth Night opens with a terrific Viola

Jessica B. Hill is an absolute delight as the drama’s leading lady who spends most of this play in disguise as a leading man

Twelfth Night

AT THE FESTIVAL THEATRE IN STRATFORD, ONT.

Written by William Shakespeare Directed by Seana McKenna Starring Jessica B. Hill, André Sills and Vanessa Sears

Twelfth Night is the opening show of the Stratford Festival season this year, with director Seana McKenna’s 1960sset production marking the 13th time the Shakespeare comedy has been staged at the esteemed Ontario repertory theatre.

Thirteen is generally considered an unlucky number – but Stratford has hit the jackpot with its 13th Viola/Cesario, at least.

Jessica B. Hill, who has risen through the ranks at Stratford over the past decade, is an absolute delight as the leading lady who spends most of this play in disguise as a leading man.

As Shakespeare’s story goes, Viola is shipwrecked in the land of Illyria, and her brother, Sebastian, is presumed lost at sea. In a transfiguration motivated by her grief and a desire for safety, she decides to put on men’s clothing, call herself Cesario and serve the local count, Orsino.

Orsino (André Sills, at his most cuddly) is lovesick for a local countess named Olivia – and decides to send Cesario off to woo her on his behalf. Naturally, Olivia (Vanessa Sears, at her most charming) falls for Viola dressed as Cesario instead – just as Viola has fallen for Orsino, who does not realize she is a woman.

This gender-bending love triangle is beautifully acted all around, with Hill giving a particularly bravura performance.

In her staging, McKenna – a first-time Stratford director, but a legendary, long-time actress with the company who’s previously played both Viola and Olivia – has foregrounded movement.

She opens the show with Hill and Austin Eckert’s Sebastian – who, of course, crops up again at the end of the play and is mistaken for Cesario – performing a mime show of the shipwreck up on the prow-like balcony of the Festival Theatre stage, here stripped down to its original, bare-bones configuration.

Hill, who has the emotive eyes of a silent-film star and the rubbery limbs of a cartoon character, is great at selling this kind of physical theatre. Indeed, her Viola seems like she never fully gets her land legs back after her ship sinks; she’s constantly rocking back and forth, trying to repress her more feminine impulses, or putting on male mannerisms, as Cesario.

But Hill’s Viola is not the only character who moves in a heightened, almost clown-like way. McKenna has all the actors tread the boards in stylized ways punctuated by regular slapstick; it’s rare that more than a few lines will go by without some sort of extravagant gesture to underline a joke, or a silly walk, or a crude sexual motion (or a funny voice).

I generally enjoy the Stratford house approach to comedy – broad with lots of stage business in case you don’t get Shakespeare’s jokes – but the way McKenna has stuffed her production with mannered movement feels frenzied. Too often, I found a genuinely romantic or human or humorous moment was quickly undercut by something phony or imposed.

This is, nevertheless, one of the best casts you might find assembled for a Twelfth Night.

The crème de la crème of the company fills the secondary plot involving the battle between Olivia’s puritanical steward, Malvolio (Laura Condlln), and her drunken uncle, Sir Toby Belch (a debauched Rat Pack-styled Scott Wentworth), whose entourage includes the schemer, Maria (Sarah Dodd), and the gull, Sir Andrew Aguecheek (Rylan Wilkie).

Then there’s Deborah Hay as the clown, Feste, who makes an incredible impression whenever she opens her mouth to sing. She’s made up to look a little like Joni Mitchell and delivers haunting, mournful settings of Shakespeare’s songs composed by Paul Shilton in that Canadian folk icon’s style.

Beyond this enjoyable nod to Joni, I couldn’t make heads or tails of why McKenna had chosen to set Twelfth Night in the spring of 1967. That’s a very specific choice – I was hoping Expo 67 might play a role – but Christina Poddubiuk’s costumes just give off tickle-trunk hippie vibes.

Where that year might have informed the action more deeply would have been regarding Malvolio, who is a woman and in love with her female employer. In this production, the trick that Sir Toby and his friends play on her comes across as a mean-spirited outing of a lesbian – followed by cruel violence as she’s held bound in a dark cell.

The implications of this aren’t wrestled with enough, and McKenna’s production could have gestured at changes coming: some sign of the prime minister of Illyria’s plans to introduce an omnibus bill to keep the state out of the bedrooms of the nation later that year, say, or that, in a couple more years, this fantasy land’s version of Stonewall might happen.

Instead, Condlln’s performance as Malvolio, which has the seeds of something superb, is upstaged by dopey business involving bonsai trees in wheelbarrows in the letter-discovery scene – and she is made to dry hump too many parts of the set once she dons her cross-gartered yellow stockings.

The sense is of McKenna not trusting her skill (she’s a Dora-winning director after all), her actors or Shakespeare quite enough. Her Twelfth Night might have achieved greatness if everything weren’t turned up to 11.

Jessica B. Hill, who has the emotive eyes of a silent-film star and the rubbery limbs of a cartoon character, is great at selling this kind of physical theatre.

Twelfth Night runs to Oct. 26.