Word: malvolio
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...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...
...gestures at great length. When he discovers the forged love note, he milks its contents interminably, sketching the enigmatic capital letters in the air and mouthing them repeatedly ad nauseam. And his labored attempts to achieve a smile should have stayed in vaudeville. Like Falstaff in Henry IV, Malvolio hasn't learned a thing by the end of the play, but he is not utterly stupid. Yet Dishy makes him seem more slow-witted than Sir Andrew...
...second superb performance is Ellis Rabb's snooty Malvolio. Rabb was, in fact, one of the best players in the AST's early years. At any rate, this is his fourth enactment of Malvolio (he has even directed Twelfth Night elsewhere), and his experience shows...
...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...