Finding Flow: Immigrants and the Tao in the Twelfth Night

Twelfth Night, a Shakespearean Comedy, is being staged by the Shakespeare Company at the Vertigo Studio Theatre and is set to end its run on the 19th of October. The Twelfth Night has traditionally not been seen as one of Shakespeare’s problem plays (Shakespearean works that do not neatly fit into the comedy, tragedy, or history genre). Still, a slew of ambiguous moral and social issues in the play challenges the audience’s interpretations of love, gender, and human identity. The thematic fluidity of the play is perfectly encapsulated in its title. The Twelfth Night was a historical period of misrule where normative expectations were temporarily suspended, and a moratorium was placed on the social order. Kings and queens of misrule became lightning rods of chaos, servants would trade clothes with their masters and a fair amount of cross-dressing would occur, blurring the lines between gender roles and social hierarchies. True to the zany spirit of role reversals, the company opened the play by developing a play-within-a-play structure. A rag-tag bunch of itinerant actors on a travelling stage serve as performers and characters, enmeshing performance, and reality. The meta-theatricality served as a perfect counterpoint to Orsino’s opening lines, “if music be the food of love, play on…”, the central motif of music (consistent throughout the play) resonates deeply with the theme of theatrical self-awareness, reflecting the undulating and unpredictable rhythms of human thought, choice, and action. Perhaps the suggestion was that we are all aware of being watched, the observer and the observed participate in the grand theatre of human awareness. All of us, actors and the audience become co-creators, developing a shared consciousness around the play. This is the second play in the last month that I have encountered the theme of meta-theatricality (play within a play) in, I do not see this as a thematic coincidence. This is possibly an expression of our cultural anxieties around what Guy Debord termed The Society of the Spectacle, a society where social relationships are increasingly mediated by commoditized representations. Reality in such a society is no longer un-mediated or direct but is obscured by abstractions and symbols. In such a society we are no longer rendered human by un-mediated social intercourse but like driftwood in a digital sea, find ourselves drifting through fragmented interactions, observing spectral and disembodied images in virtual echo spheres. An encounter in the theatre is different, qualitatively different, here we are not as alienated, nor are we completely subject to an authoritative politics of mediation. The social imagination of the collective is no longer mediated by technocrats, bureaucrats, specialists, experts, and people who manufacture consent and politically shape social perceptions from a distance. The theatre offers a participatory and visceral experience, potentially liberated from the tyranny of abstractions and images that trigger commodified behaviors to the digital spectacle. Not to say that good cinema cannot do this, but the scale and scope of its projection lend it to being susceptible to propaganda in ways that theatre, with its unmediated immediacy and intimacy, cannot be.

There are endless themes one could extract from the play, Viola's performative adoption of masculine identity and general themes around gender fluidity, and homo/pan sexuality are fascinating, but these themes are (deservedly so) already receiving a fair amount of cultural attention.

I could not help but think of Viola’s plight as equivalent to the plight of the immigrant or refugee. Like Viola, many of them are shipwrecked, devastated by political and social tumult in their native countries, and like Viola are expected to navigate radically new cultural and social terrains once they leave. They, like Viola, are required to don new performative identities, they are suddenly told that they must start to become something other than what they have been, and are subject to a sort of de-naturalization, their symbols, their practices, their memories, the very foundation of who they are is subject to foreign redefinition and transformation. The legal basis of their identity is confirmed and stated as 'naturalization' in their new countries, this is ironic considering the process potentially strips them of their inherited markers. Granted, it is never as simple as this, some are grateful to have new identities, grateful to be part of a society where they are never five minutes away from a military coup. Just like it can be difficult to singularly thematize the genre of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, it is similarly difficult to singularly thematize the subjectivity of immigrants and refugees. They can be grateful and resentful, liberated yet disoriented, have pride in their new achievements and a profound sense of loss in what they have had to leave behind. Seen through this lens, the ideological significance of the character Malvolio deepens. Historically he represented a bunch of folks known as the Puritans who had practices rooted in moral rigor and religious reform. The primacy of the biblical word, predestination (no amount of good works can avert the judgement of God), sobriety, opposition to pleasures like the theatre, etc., were the ideological hallmarks of the Puritans. However, in today’s context, Malvolio can be seen as symbolizing something equivalent to an anti-immigration sentiment, if he knew who Viola was, he would expunge her, rejecting anyone who does not conform to recognized cultural markers. Malvolio’s ominous line at the end, “I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you” is comparable to something much darker taking root in our country - a Malvolian resurgence of xenophobia. Like Malvolio (he is locked in a room devoid of light during the latter half of the play) anti-immigration sentiments were momentarily interred in the dark and all the social and economic benefits of immigration were extolled to us during this period, and now we see a resurgence of exclusionary reactions we thought we had left behind in the previous century. The figurative significance of Malvolio in our country might very well be representative of some contemporary form of ethnocultural purity, where instead of the primacy of the biblical word we have an ethnocultural canon (this is what it means to be Canadian - hockey - beer - whatever the nationalist or regionalist flavour of the year is), the contemporary analogy of pre-destination would be some form of inherent exclusion - no matter how hard immigrants/refugees work, no matter how much tax they pay, they are always adjudged to be outsiders, nothing will change that.

This Malvolian exclusionism is only compounded in a society where we are assaulted by the political manipulations of the spectacle, the subjectivity of an immigrant is now slowly being reduced to crass abstractions. Unlike Viola, there is no play offered to them to tell us their story, we are not aware of their shipwrecks and the depths of their journeys. Their stories are flattened to soundbites and made invisible by the very abstractions that claim to represent them. Yet, akin to the spirit of Twelfth Night, many immigrants and refugees retain their resilience with a sense of humour. Just like Viola is required to dance between order and chaos in the play, so too do immigrants balance the entire weight of their displacement with adaptability. Coincidentally, after the play, on the way back I had an Uber driver (Abel) tell me that he could not go back home (Eritrea) to his mother’s funeral, he was a political dissident and would be imprisoned if he went back. Instead of getting into a morose description of the misery he must have felt, he recounted how his mother had a penchant for mimicry and proceeded to mimic his mother with a plethora of contorted voices and faces. For close to ten minutes, he became a performative canvas of everyone he missed and loved back home, channeling his memories through a range of expressions that captured the essence of his lost world. Beautiful and Surreal.

The Shakespeare Company must be applauded for doing a couple of things, having consistent devotion to staging what is affectionately known as the secular gospel (Shakespeare's work) and onboarding three students with main roles in this production. In the brochure, they stated that they wanted to bridge the gap between the performing arts as a discipline and the academic ecosystem that students reside in, they put their money where their mouth is, and this must be appreciated. Helen Knight as Viola brought intricacy to the role, elevating the rambunctious hilarity of the comical scenes with well-timed gesticulations, and also bringing gravitas to the poignant sections of the play. She was a fascinating artist to watch and seems to be someone who has a lot more range than what she showed on stage. I felt that this range was not fully explored throughout the play, this may be because some of the scenes felt rushed or underdeveloped. That being said, she was very good and brought a self-effacing confidence to the stage. There were fleeting moments where her performance almost bordered on brilliance, especially towards the end, but this was not the forum for us to see it. Joel David Taylor infused an ample amount of hilarity into the play as Malvolio, but I left feeling like I did not understand the complex subjectivity of the character. The tropes were good, but after a while started to conceal the complex nuance of the character. There is always the temptation to play these types of characters with a broad brush, but it is a temptation that must be fiercely resisted.

Much of the cast are young and are students, they threw themselves into their performances with gusto and brought palpable passion onto the stage with them, sometimes that is enough to just about hold things together. Alexandra Cowman’s representation of Olivia was brave, the director must be appreciated for enabling that reinterpretation, that is not how Olivia has traditionally been played (and is still being played by several Shakespearean Companies in the UK). Olivia in this production is anything but demure or silently coquettish, she is driven by audacious passion and a brazen appetite to secure the object of her interest. I found this interpretation very, very interesting and thought it was a unique way to challenge stale stereotypes about how femininity should be portrayed on stage. The direction seemed to be laissez-faire, and that is not a criticism. It is something akin to a Taoist conception of performance, working with what is there, allowing the organic qualities of the performers to rise to the surface, enabling them to find their voice, free from pretences or contrivances. This also accords well with the alternative name of the play, what you will. It is evident that the young actors were given creative flexibility and agency to find their performances and we the audience were given the privilege of witnessing a quiet awakening of their inner purpose on stage.

The itinerant set was pleasant to watch, creating a focal space for exploring the tension between reality and illusion. It reminded me of the film The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, in such a set we are steeped in a philosophy of becoming rather than being. Much like the Taoist philosophy of change and flow, it reflects a performative space and dramatic world in constant flux. I would have liked to have seen the director play around with the set a bit more, it might have added much more dimension to the performances. The make-up and costumes were almost vaudevillian and worked well to create a distinct style, one bordering on minimalism yet rich with just enough detail.

In keeping with the stringent theme of these reviews, I cannot give this production a 7.5 (minimum score), but what I can give it is ample appreciation for staging a performance with some serious heart. This was a bold undertaking for a young cast, and those limitations are acknowledged.

Now to the tough bit - The production fell short in certain areas that are vital for a fully developed Shakespeare performance. Many of the individual performances were unfinished, still in a state of nascent development. Several characters did not seem to be able to shift between various passages of the play without relying on stock mimetic responses. In scenes that required more emotional resonance, these responses were not effective. Some of the scenes felt far too reliant on physical comedy and the muscularity of Shakespeare's language felt lost in the process. The emotional pacing of the play started to fray around the edges in the middle section of the play, some of the scenes became dramatically indistinct because of the stock responses. Emotional beats seemed rushed, which affected the cohesion of the narrative. This was most probably the result of young actors not being sure how to embody the sub-text. In certain sections of the plays, pre-determined gestures felt repetitive and disconnected from the dramatic texture of the scenes. That being said the last scene came together very well - Helen Knight knocked it out of the park shifting the emotional register in nanoseconds at the end from comic obstreperousness to feminine vulnerability. She had us locked in at the end.

Critique aside, it was the raw, genuine and passionate effort of the actors that stood out, an unfiltered sincerity that brought the inner light of all these performers to the stage. This production certainly embodied something of the Tao, the director embraced authenticity over perfection. Only the very brave can do this - to trust in their young actors, to let go and to allow them to evolve in front of a live audience.

Sometimes it really is about the authenticity of connection - the folks in the twelfth night had it in spades.

Rating – 6