Word: comical
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...best of the low comic performances is also the most delicate: John Neville's pathetic, feeble-minded, utterly out-of-it Sir Andrew Aguecheek. Dudley Jones plays Feste as a sad, second-rate jester who has a hard time making a living, and his fine performance helps to keep the plaintive note running through the comic scenes (though it points up the fact that William S. Gilbert's Jack Point, constructed on the same basis, is a more interesting character than Feste). Richard Wordsworth (Malvolio), Joss Ackland (Sir Toby Belch), and the other comics play conventionally, with the down...
...distinction can be made (and, in a sense, it cannot), the main interest of Twelfth Night is poetic rather than human. The characters lack the idiosyncratic vigor of Shakespeare's best comic characters, and very little that they say or do is very funny. Their emotions are never intense; the lovers, with all their pleading and scorning, their smiling and sighing and blinking back tears, are, as has been pointed out before, less in love with each other than with love itself. The play's charm derives very largely from its rather limp-wristed, but very pretty, love poetry...
...gentle, mildly charming production that Michael Benthall has directed for the Old Vic, the love poetry and the subtly melancholy atmosphere it distills form the pervading element, and the contrasting comic elements are very much played down. There is a distinct lack of any sort of vitality, but in Twelth Night vitality can be ruinous if not restrained, and its absence can be borne. The most basic need is for technique and taste in the production rather than energy and passion, and the former are the qualities that the Vic is best equipped to provide...
...comic scenes, full of bawling, bibulation, and bawdry, appear to have been written as noisy relief from the prevailing mood of quiet delicacy. But this mood is enunciated with such graceful strength in the set, that although Mr. Benthall puts his actors through all the burps and stumbles common in Shakespearean slapstick (or at least allows them a free hand in this respect), they never seem coarse or even very vigorous. The basis of the comic subplot is the duping of Malvolio, the puritanical steward, by a group of cheerful tosspots--a little joke which has occasionally struck critics...
Perhaps these comic scenes are really hilarious; they did not strike me that way, but everyone around me at the theatre was laughing fit to kill. At any rate, Mr. Benthall has certainly made them pleasant enough, with not much help from Shakespeare except for Sir Toby's great line to Malvolio: "Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes...