Word: olivia
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Redgrave would do well to cut down somewhat on all the donning and doffing and crumpling of her tricorne. Freedman has involved her in one inspired bit of innovative staging: during the singing of "O Mistress Mine" Orsino and Olivia appear in the opposing balconies, each meditatively gazing up into the night sky; Viola silently enters below, and, while listening, looks up at first one and then the other. We thus have a visual triangle to underline the love triangle in which the three characters are involved...
Penny Fuller is an attractive enough Olivia, though she plays pretty close to the surface. Not only is she intent on a seven-year period of mourning for her brother, but she carries a black fan and even keeps her two sofas draped in black. In private she pops mints into her mouth from a pillbox. In her first meeting with Viola--Cesario she raises a smile by ticking off her virtues--lips, eyes, neck, chin--and then tucking her locket mirror into her bosom on the words "and so forth." She leaves no doubt that she is smitten...
...woos Olivia from afar, Orsino usually comes off as insipid and invertebrate. How welcome, then, to find Laurence Guittard imbuing the role with solidity! Orsino's understanding lags behind his feelings, but the man does feel. Guittard gives us the melancholy, but he also gives us the passion and assertiveness (the name Orsino, after all, means "bearish"). He speaks sonorously and creates a duke of real size...
...much care for most of Laura Crow's eclectic costumes either. The ones for Olivia's household, post-Elizabethan but still European, are passable. But those for Orsino and his attendants are light organdy dresses that seem to have wandered out of some edition of The Arabian Nights. Is this supposed to be a reverse comment on Viola's transvestism...
...role of Viola, which contains a good deal of bravura, tends to overshadow the role of Olivia. But the latter is actually a much subtler part, and a harder one to do well. Yet Patricia Conolly's Olivia here is one of the three major roles in which Brandeis surpasses Startford. Conolly never loses a countess's proper carriage, nor does she violate the character's mellowness. In her first meeting with Viola, her veil is too transparent, but her timing in this scene is masterly. And on first seeing the twins together she can put a world of meaning...