Trevor Nunn moves Shakespeare’s comedy to a grey, lamplit nineteenth century and plays it as sadly as the text allows. It is handsomely acted, slow in the middle and funnier than its reputation, and Nigel Hawthorne’s Malvolio is the reason to see it.
Trevor Nunn ran the Royal Shakespeare Company, and his Twelfth Night has the virtues and habits of a man who has staged the play more than once. He knows the text, where to cut it, which jokes still land. He is less sure what a camera is for. It is handsome, sad and slow, with five or six performances that carry it, and we recommend it to anyone who likes the play. The undecided should know it runs 134 minutes and takes every one of them.
Nunn moves Illyria to the late nineteenth century: braided tunics for Orsino’s men, a country house hung with black for Olivia, a coast of cliffs, rain and a wrecked steamer. The opening is his own: Viola and Sebastian doing a parlour act aboard ship, both veiled and in dresses, one pulling off a false moustache, moments before the ship goes down. Not a line has been spoken and the film has already told us what it is about.
Nigel Hawthorne’s Malvolio is the reason to see it. He plays the steward as a man polished into a pillar and terrified of being touched, the voice pitched half a tone too high for its own dignity. Richard E. Grant’s Sir Andrew is all elbows and hope, and Mel Smith’s Sir Toby is a sodden bully who knows how much he can take from him. Imelda Staunton’s Maria runs the house between them. Ben Kingsley plays Feste as an old man with a squeezebox, and sings the songs himself in a voice that is not pretty and does not need to be.
Imogen Stubbs is a quick, likeable Viola, best when Cesario is being looked at and does not know where to put his hands. Helena Bonham Carter’s Olivia drops her mourning in the time it takes to cross a room, which is funny and right. Toby Stephens’s Orsino is the weak corner, a boy in a big uniform who lies about waiting for other people’s scenes, and we never see why two people love him. Nunn pulls the camera back whenever Cesario gets close enough to Olivia or Orsino to make anyone wonder. The play is interested; the film cuts away.
Clive Tickner shoots it in greys and greens, outdoors under cloud off the sea, indoors by candle and lamp so faces come out of brown. Sophie Becher gives Olivia dark wood and drawn curtains; Toby’s kitchen is the one warm room in Illyria. John Bright dresses Malvolio in a black frock coat and chain of office, and Olivia in heavy mourning black. Shaun Davey’s score is fiddle and low strings, best when it gets out of Kingsley’s way. Peter Boyle cuts the two households side by side, clearer than the play and slower, because every scene runs full length.
Here is what got at us. The letter trick played on Malvolio is the play’s biggest laugh and we laughed as hard as anyone; Hawthorne reading it aloud and persuading himself, line by line, that it means what he wants it to mean is a lesson in self-deception. What follows for him we will not describe, except that Nunn and Hawthorne refuse to let it stay funny, and we had stopped laughing some minutes before we noticed we had. Many productions hurry past that. This one sits in it.
The cost is pace. There is a long middle in which the duel between Cesario and Sir Andrew is set up, deferred and set up again, and Nunn, who wrote the screenplay, keeps more of it than a film needs. Around the ninety-minute mark we were watching the weather. Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing (1993) made the opposite bet, cut hard and ran at the sun: a shallower film and a brisker evening.
See this one on a wet Sunday afternoon, when its mood will match yours, and stay for Kingsley’s last song, sung to nobody, which closes the film properly. It carries a U certificate. Accurate, and a little misleading: there is nothing here a child cannot watch, and a fair amount they will not understand the adults going quiet over.
