Word: malvolio
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...press opening, Kenneth Haigh's Prospero seemed imbued with a weariness that I don't think either he or the director intended. Haigh's load this summer is enough to tire anyone: when he is not doing Prospero, he is playing either Brutus (an even longer role) or Malvolio. At any rate, his Prospero is not yet a sustained piece of work...
...still don't like Freedman's decision to fuse Fabian and the clown Feste into one character, and he still has not taught his players to accent the word exquisite on the first syllable. The cross-gartering of Malvolio's yellow stockings is still inadequate, although Freedman and his costumer Jeanne Button had only to descend into the downstairs lounge of this very theatre to see on the wall an illustration of how it should be executed...
...most striking change--and welcome it is--comes with the spoilsport steward Malvolio. Bob Dishy's portrayal last summer was by far the worst Malvolio I have ever seen, professional or amateur. This time we have Kenneth Haigh, who knows what he's doing. He can wither with a glance, and inflate his importance with a long swagger-stick. And he is wise enough not to protract the Letter Scene beyond endurance. Fine as Haigh is though he has not found as many nucances in the character as Philip Kerr did on this came stage...
...trying to suppress the midnight carousers by saying, "Are you mad? Or what are you?," he can make the word what sound perfectly awful-similarly, in a later scene, when he brands them "shallow things." In the Letter Scene, Malvolio reads the sentence, "If this fall into thy hand, revolve." I must confess that I always enjoy seeing the actor foolishly turn around (as Rabb does), although in Shakespeare's day the word revolve meant simply consider, and had not yet taken on the modern meaning of rotate...
...Jove to God. And his costumer, like the Startford one, has skimped on the cross-gartering. In proper cross-gartering, it is not enough to enclose just the kneecap; the crisscrossing should go all the way down the leg to the foot, as in the well-known 18th-century Malvolio painting by Ramberg. In the Prison Scene it is poor staging that allows us to see only Malvolio's hands sticking through a basement window. Still, Rabb's is a portrayal to cherish, right up to the series of glares he aims at one person after another when, unenlightened...